The Napoleonic Mediterranean: Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire 9781350988958, 9781786730879

Table of contents :
Cover
Author Bio
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Delineating an Imperial Region
Part I: The Historical Geography of the Napoleonic Mediterranean
1. The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy
2. The Myth and Reality of Italian Regionalism: A Historical Geography of Napoleonic Italy, 1801–14
Part II: The Law of the French
3. A Clash of Enlightenments: Judicial Reform in the Napoleonic Republic and Kingdom of Italy
4. Imperial Law on the Marches of Empire: Napoleonic Legal Reforms in Catalonia, 1810–13
5. The Napoleonic Judicial System in the Illyrian Provinces, 1809–13: An Exercise in Incongruity?
Part III: Pride and Prejudice
6. Ferdinando Dal Pozzo: A Piedmontese Notable at the Heart of Napoleonic Europe, 1800–14
7. Cultural Imperialism in a European Context?: Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy
8. Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800–14
Notes
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

Michael Broers is Professor of Western European History, University of Oxford and Fellow in Modern History, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. His books include The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796– 1814; The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy; Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny; Europe Under Napoleon (I.B.Tauris) and Europe after Napoleon: From the Congress of Vienna to the 1848 Revolutions (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming).

Praise for Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny ‘Surely will become the definitive life of Napoleon’ The Times ‘This is a masterly biography, both critical and empathetic’ Christopher Silvester, Financial Times ‘Stimulating and genuinely innovative’ William Doyle, Times Literary Supplement ‘Judicious and magisterial . . . Broers’ grasp of “violently changing times” is unimpeachable’ Daily Mail ‘Brings home brilliantly the vitality, intelligence and phenomenal drive of this man, and the improbability of his achievements . . . The wait for volume two is going to be unbearable’ Mail on Sunday ‘Breathtaking. The best – and certainly the most original – scholar writing in this field . . . Broers succeeds admirably’ New York Review of Books

THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire

MICHAEL BROERS

To the remarkable people of the Cardiology Units of the Nuffield Manor and John Radcliffe Hospitals, Oxford, who shall always be an inspiration to me.

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2017 Michael Broers The right of Michael Broers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Historical Studies 102 ISBN: 978 1 78453 144 7 eISBN: 978 1 78672 087 0 ePDF: 978 1 78673 087 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

Introduction Delineating an Imperial Region

1

Part I. The Historical Geography of the Napoleonic Mediterranean 1. 2.

The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy The Myth and Reality of Italian Regionalism: A Historical Geography of Napoleonic Italy, 1801– 14

47 64

Part II. The Law of the French 3. 4. 5.

A Clash of Enlightenments: Judicial Reform in the Napoleonic Republic and Kingdom of Italy Imperial Law on the Marches of Empire: Napoleonic Legal Reforms in Catalonia, 1810– 13 The Napoleonic Judicial System in the Illyrian Provinces, 1809–13: An Exercise in Incongruity?

87 132 190

Part III. Pride and Prejudice 6. 7.

Ferdinando Dal Pozzo: A Piedmontese Notable at the Heart of Napoleonic Europe, 1800–14 Cultural Imperialism in a European Context?: Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy

223 261

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vi

8.

Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800– 14

Notes Further Reading Index

286 308 352 353

PREFACE

The chapters of this book stretch over many years, and have incurred countless debts to friends and colleagues, archivists and librarians, across France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Many were researched and written with the generosity of granting bodies. The four central chapters of this volume were made possible by the combined help of the awards of Major Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (2011– 13) and a British Academy Small Grant in Aid of Research (2010– 11). I wish to thank both bodies most sincerely for their faith in my abilities; these chapters are, hopefully, the first fruits of further research, and I can only hope they are worthy of such confidence in my work. I also wish to thank the Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, and the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford, for their support of the latter stages of the central chapters of this volume, and for the leave they accorded me during the Major Leverhulme award. My deepest thanks go to Jo Godfrey and Lester Crook, at I.B.Tauris, who offered me not just the opportunity to publish this book, but the freedom to write its central chapters and to express my findings at such length, and in such depth. Jo Godfrey, my former student and now an outstanding history editor, is someone of whom our college, Lady Margaret Hall, can be justifiably proud, and I can only hope this book does not tarnish her fine reputation undeservedly. The later stages of writing were dogged by illness, and I owe very special thanks to many friends and colleagues who supported me in the last two years: Geoff Ellis, John Land, Allan Doig, Alan Forrest and ‘the History Boys’ of LMH: Grant Tapsell, Geraint Thomas and the medical staffs of the

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Nuffield Manor, John Radcliffe and Churchill hospitals of Oxford, without whom I would simply not be here. Its last pages were written after the loss of my cat, Louis. By name, by nature, the gentle, noble king of beasts. He kept watch on me as I wrote so much of this. The contents of this book span many years, but the earliest were written when I first met Sue, my wife of 26 years. They span our life together, and this book is for her. Who else?

INTRODUCTION DELINEATING AN IMPERIAL REGION

The impact of Fernand Braudel: Structure and agency in history Imperialism in a Mediterranean context

A

t first glance, there can seem no more incongruous pairing than that of Fernand Braudel, the greatest exponent of la longue dure´e, and a historian of ‘the Napoleonic episode’. It may well prove that the first glance is, indeed, correct, but as I attempted to search for a ‘red thread’ in this collection of chapters and, indeed, for a source of continuous influence in all my work, Braudel recurred, over and again. His first volume of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II1 has taught me more than any other book about the nature of the region I work on. Braudel’s annalisme provides the bedrock, in every sense, for a deeper understanding of the impact of an exercise in imperialism on this particular region. It is futile to try to understand the influence, or its absence, of Napoleonic rule in the Mediterranean, in any other terms than through the physical and human geography Braudel outlined in that seminal work. This appears to be taking sides in a great historiographical battle, that of agency versus structure, and if forced to do so, my thesis would lead me to side with Braudel and structure, even over so powerful ‘an agent’ as Napoleon I. In truth, it is about balance, as John Lewis Gaddis has rightly asserted.2

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That balance always lies somewhere between two extremes, but almost never at the meridian, and there is much to suggest that, in this geographical and historical context, the scales tip in favour of Braudel and structural forces. The French revolutionaries and the Napoleonic imperialists promoted rupture, because they encountered continuity. For all the ideological sound and fury of the French Revolution, just as for all the ambitious state-building of the Napoleonic regimes, the world they sought to master was still an early modern one. Technology was not yet so advanced as to move mountains or sweep over seas with the speed of steam that would change the world a generation later. The ‘new regime’ still had to spread enlightenment on horseback – or on mule-back if it really wanted to reach much of the region – and by sail and wind. Thus, the mountains still came first, and the sea was still the surest highway, if beset by wind and tide. There is no escaping these basic truths, and Braudel is the historian best equipped to remind us of them. My debt to Braudel reaches much further than these essentials, however. Braudel’s coupling of history and geography remains fundamental to me, but his influence begins there, rather than ends. Perhaps unwittingly, Braudel is an excellent guide to the problems of imperial rule. He searches out and pinpoints wide patterns across the Mediterranean, less in the quest for linkage than in discerning similarities born of comparable local circumstances. In this way, he provides an illuminating context for the experiences of imperial administrators, servants of a regime bent on uniformity, confronted by incongruity, but whose responses to the particular regions they administered proved remarkably similar, when set beside each other. The societies, political cultures and economies of far-flung imperial possessions had, after all, considerable affinities. On the one hand, such similarities were in the eyes of beholders who shared a rigid, imperial vision, but a reading of Braudel reveals that such regions did, indeed, have many fundamental things in common, born of topography, climate, and the influence of both on society, the economy, and the nature of the state. The eye of the imperial servants may have been jaundiced by a sense of cultural superiority, but their common responses to living in the widespread provinces of the empire were not based, entirely, on prejudice. They stemmed from the enduring patterns within the atomised regions of the Mediterranean macro-region, which Braudel discerned with such skill. They met similar

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circumstances in areas which were distant from each other, and they responded to them, in like fashion. Although Braudel may have eschewed the concept of rupture, in favour of continuity, he understood the power of the episodic trauma, having survived the greatest traumatic rupture in Western history, if only just, and unlike his great friend, the heroic Marc Bloch. Braudel knew that what he famously called ‘the great waves of civilisation’3 crashed on the shores of the inland sea, and that ‘history’ tried to breach the mountain fastness, just as much as he believed these currents were usually thrown back, when they met the intractables of geography. Such episodic traumas matter, nonetheless. Ideologies and political crises have deep roots in society, even if the events which trigger them have immediate sparks. The Napoleonic civilising mission cannot be divorced from the earlier incursions of Trent into the hinterlands; the varied fates of the new revolutionary regime in city, mountain and plain must be considered in the context of a longue dure´e which Braudel saw as beginning in the early modern period, when any ambitious state or ruler faced the same basic challenges as Napoleon, in the early nineteenth century. There are currents of cultural history which those involved would have shuddered to acknowledge, yet l’homme re´ge´ne´re´ of the new regime was faced by the same intransigence as the Catholic Reformation: las Nuestras Indı´as remained untamed in the eyes of Napoleonic imperialism, whatever the complex realities. The mountains remained ‘on the fringe of the great waves of civilisation’ for the adepts of the French Revolution, just as they had for ‘the Jesuits or Carlo Borromeo. Gramsci remarked caustically that the Jesuits contested Machiavelli in theory while remaining in practice his disciples’.4 If the Jesuits followed Machiavelli, Napoleon followed the Jesuits, right into the heart of the mountains, to enforce cultural hegemony – ‘enlightenment’ – just as the Jesuits had done in the cause of orthodoxy against ‘heretical movements (which) were manifestations of popular forces’, at least in the eyes of the Council of Trent, and of Gramsci.5 The Tridentine clergy saw wantonness which opened the door to apostasy in the urban world, and heresy born of ignorance, in the mountains. The cities remained dens of iniquity, while the mountains were still havens of almost prehistoric, indeed, ahistoric savagery for the regenerative French, just as they had been for the purifying clergy of Trent, even though the French believed the Tridentine Church to be the

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root of the problem, the source of the corruption of the cities and the superstition of the mountain. The currents of the longue dure´e might offer another perspective on the French civilising mission, however. Generations of Borromean bishops and Jesuit missionaries to the peripheries of Italy and Iberia were followed in a very ironic apostolic succession by Napoleonic imperial administrators. Both reveal themselves in their correspondence as fully conscious of the power of structural forces, that is, of the power of the mountain to thrust back the waves of civilisation. They would have seen Braudel’s point, and would have scoffed at the Gramscian theory that all popular meridional culture was derived in essence from elite culture – from the waves of civilisation – which had degenerated in this geographic setting.6 Even Gramsci’s attempt to subordinate agency to structure, in a Marxist framework, would have appeared too optimistic to those who had to govern the region. Norvins de Montbreton the head of the Napoleonic police in Rome, articulated well this view of the failure of ‘modernity’ in the Apennines. The weakness of the ancien re´gime governments, coupled with geography, fostered narrow political worlds and gave rise to the vicious internal vendettas of the Roman periphery, and he saw the arrival of empire as the best cure: In Rome, there is nothing to fear in these animosities, but in the small mountain towns, which are not held in check by the authorities, and where old prejudices have not been enlightened by regular contact with the centre of the empire, hatreds fester in the heart, opinions in the soul, and external events which imperceptibly destroy any hope of returning to the lost, mourned ways of the past, only increase the sharp edges of these passions, instead of killing them. They plunge men into a sort of political despair that it would be useful for us to exploit for the government.7 Marshal Suchet, writing in the context of upland Arago´n, believed he confronted something quite similar: What is most shocking is not the events, horrible as they are, since similiar things repeat themselves in most civil wars or revolutions; rather, it is the depravity of the ideas and feelings of which they are the proof.8

INTRODUCTION

5

The wildness of the periphery was not just a phenomenon of the peasantry but, rather, a nest of depravity for the intelligentsia of the rural bourgeoisie. This was nothing to do with the decadent, priest-ridden inertia of the plains, but it created the ‘blocked society’ Gramsci discerned just over a century later, and made even the elites of the periphery a ‘subaltern’ group, incapable of anything but local, mutually antagonistic leadership. Norvins and Suchet hoped the Napoleonic state might find advantage in this, on the one hand, by drawing them into the state’s orbit, and so into civilisation. This would stifle any hope of Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, but Norvins’ objective assessment of the political culture of the Italian rural bourgeoisie corresponded to his own: ‘The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they become a state’.9 There was, at least, ‘life’ in this world, however warped. Norvins saw this in Italy, and Suchet detected as much in the uplands of Arago´n: The Aragonese are proud, opinionated, jealous of their liberties . . . The influence of their early institutions is still alive in their national character, and they lift their political moeurs above those of the other peoples of Spain.10 First, however, agency had to try to overcome structure, and those who flooded the mountains with civilising waves strove to keep faith with the agencies of the Catholic Reformation and the Enlightenment, respectively. It was no easy matter, however. On the eve of the Napoleonic conquest of the Mediterranean, this ‘savage mountain’ freedom turned on the French. No one has put this better than Charles Esdaile: ‘A country that was both physically suited to guerrilla warfare and accustomed to its concepts, Spain was therefore conditioned to hate the French (in 1808)’.11 The same had proved true in Italy, a decade earlier, and emerged with equal fury in the Balkans. Braudel is a prescient reminder of why.

The Mediterranean basin and the age of revolution: A cauldron At the beginning of the first volume of his history, Braudel described the Mediterranean as a landlocked sea, ringed by mountains, and dominated by five peninsulas, one in Asia (Anatolia), one in Africa (the Maghreb), and three on its northern, European shores: Italy, Iberia and the

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Balkans.12 Napoleonic imperialism came to dominate the first, tried determinedly to master the second, and acquired a tenuous toehold in the third of the European arms of the inland sea, and held the ‘bridge’ – the French Midi – between Italy and Iberia. The ‘Napoleonic Mediterranean’ was composed, then, of almost the entirety of the western, European lands bordering its northern shores, however tenuously many of those shores were held along the Spanish Levant or the eastern Adriatic. The disastrous attempt to conquer Egypt in 1798–99, and the rapid loss of Malta to the British in the same years, permanently sealed its eastward and southern limits early in the process of French expansion. None of its Mediterranean possessions were easily held; all of them, the French Midi not excepted,13 were volatile societies which showed determined resistance to the new state forged by the French Revolution and responded to the divisive politics of the era by inserting them into their own time-honoured cultures of violence, personal and collective. The history of the ‘Napoleonic Mediterranean’ is a history of violence, inveterate divisions and struggle. Its contours were crystallised almost everywhere by the French invasions, first by the Parisian arme´es re´volutionnaires in the course of the Federalist revolts of the mid 1790s in the French Midi, and then by the first Italian campaign of 1796–7, the first in a long series of expansionist French aggressions which encompassed the re-conquest of northern Italy in 1800, the occupation of the mainland Kingdom of Naples in 1806, the invasion of Spain in 1808, and the seizure of the ‘Illyrian provinces’ of modern Slovenia and Croatia and the Papal States in 1809– 10. Each of these incursions divided the societies they trampled over, clarifying long existing rivalries and animosities as well as creating new fissures under the pressure to collaborate with the French or to resist them. This process was seen almost immediately in the bagarre de Nıˆmes in 1790 and the divisions sown within the Jacobin clubs of the Federalist centres of the Midi in 1793–4; it was expanded and exacerbated by Directorial and Napoleonic imperial expansion, across the three peninsulas which came into the orbit of the Napoleonic empire. Indeed, it was the impact of the Revolution on such a culture that finally drove the Bonapartes, themselves, from Corsica to the relative, if precarious, safety of the French Midi, when the island finally split along its traditional fault lines of its ‘Italian’ coastal, urban culture and the clan-based world of the

INTRODUCTION

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upland interior, a pattern traced definitively by Braudel.14 It was a new chapter in many stories so old as to be atavistic.

Bonaparte and Braudel When the European western Mediterranean was drawn into the revolutionary conflagration, genuine ideological and intellectual divisions of a new kind emerged, centred on support for or opposition to the introduction of French reforms, and had parallels well beyond the Mediterranean.15 Nevertheless, the Napoleonic Mediterranean had characteristics of its own, which conditioned its responses to the impact of revolution and imperialism in particular ways. When these particularisms are remembered, the annaliste foundations laid down by Fernand Braudel become as seminal to understanding the imperial policies of Napoleon Bonaparte, as they were when he first applied them to those of Philip II of Spain and Sulieman.16 Much that was fundamental to the region had not changed in the intervening centuries, at least not for those who sought to rule and reform, and not just to conquer and exploit. Those who seek to build lasting political orders must always confront the permanence of geography. Braudel discerned a geographical uniformity in the great peninsulas, their deeply localised, fragmented economies, societies and cultures notwithstanding: The five peninsulas of the inland sea are very similar. If one thinks of their relief they are regularly divided between mountains – the largest part – a few plains, occasional hills, and wide plateaux . . . Each piece of these jigsaw puzzles belongs to a particular family and can be classified within a distinct typology. So . . . (there are) analogies between the materials that make them up. In other words let us shuffle the pieces of the jigsaw and compare the comparable.17 When Napoleon imposed his rule on so much of the Mediterranean, he and his collaborators were confronted not only with the political anarchy unleashed by revolution, war and indeed by revolutionary war, but also with societies and geographies which were, at once, diverse and fragmented, and yet could show remarkable similarities, from the Dalmatian Alps to Spanish Galicia, and from Lyon to Reggio Calabria.

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Comparable geography had done much to mould these societies. Sheer topographic ruggedness had constricted the power of the weak states the French overturned in Italy, ‘Illyria’ and even in Spain.18 The western Mediterranean’s most common characteristic was the way in which geography had shaped politics, the state and civil society, and how it had blurred the lines between the almost now ubiquitous division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, a concept frequently applied to European society in the decades before the French Revolution.19 The worlds the French encountered and sought to rule in meridional Europe do not correspond easily, if at all, to this pattern of ‘rational’ compartmentalisation, and all involved knew this. The atomised worlds of the small, institutionally weak states, of great cities which jealously guarded their autonomy, and of isolated upland communities which had only the most fleeting relationship with formal authority were breeding grounds for a political culture where relationships of client and patron, not state institutions, linked town and country. Justice was localised, based on arbitration, and influenced by the personal relationships of those concerned. This was a world where attempts by central authority to control the hinterlands directly through the creation of rural police forces soon degenerated into the world of the famiglia di sbirri – ‘the state’s bandits’ – who wielded great power where they existed, yet did so in no interest but their own. Only the Church was everywhere, but even its influence had to be fought for, as the Borromean reformers knew all too well: its agents often gathered information, more than enforced its will. The urban world turned on ‘entryism’, a process by which official institutions were colonised and dominated by familial networks and put to the service of a patron– client culture. It is perhaps no coincidence that two of the most influential theorists of the concept of ‘elites’ sprang from this world, the Sicilian Gaetano Mosca, and the Piedmontese, Vilfredo Pareto. Their concepts of the essence of an ‘elite’ differ sharply in many important respects: for Mosca, an elite had to control public institutions, while for Pareto, it could exist and exert influence without membership in or recourse to formal structures of power; its social cohesion was independent of the public sphere. Nevertheless, both believed that formal institutions were less important for an understanding of the realities of power than the personal relationships and family networks of the people who either staffed the apparatus of the state, or who stood outside it, secure in wealth and

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connections. The public sphere existed either to be colonised by an elite which was already formed, or simply to be ignored.20 The weakness or plain absence of the state defined the political culture of most of the Napoleonic Mediterranean, although with important exceptions such as the Savoyard monarchy and, partially, Bourbon Spain. Vast swathes of these territories were fertile ground for a political culture where the lines between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres were blurred to the point of meaninglessness. In all this, Braudel is a surer guide than Habermas. This is not to argue that there were no impulses for change in the meridional world enveloped by Napoleon. A recurrent cry among the newly arrived French in all the lands influenced by Habsburg rule, from Slovenia to Tuscany, was ‘find the men who worked for Joseph II’, just as in Spain the French sought the collaborators of Carlos III. They were found, as were the reforming togati and the embattled rural bourgeoisie of the Kingdom of Naples, the galant’uomini, and the French came to respect and rely on them.21 Nearly everywhere, however, it was an uphill battle, in every sense. It was this uniformity among societies, otherwise so different in language or local customs, which soon struck French imperialists as they set about their work. This outlook emerges from the direct, contemporary reactions of those French officials who were moved, like chess pieces, around the northern shores of the inland sea in the wake of conquest, to forge the lasting institutions of empire. Joseph-Marie Degerando saw the same societal and cultural challenges in Rome and in Catalonia in the course of his ambulant career in Napoleonic service, as did Joseph Coffinhal-Dunoyer, a stern magistrate, when shuffled between Rome and ‘Illyria’. The same atavistic divisions between the world of the mountains and the plains, between the coastal cities and the isolated valleys of the hinterlands, battered them, and shook their intellectual faith in the ability of ‘good government’ to transform backward or degenerate societies into models of enlightened French civilisation. They were challenged at every step by the world Braudel traced so well, as in almost no other part of Europe under Napoleonic rule, and geography was the key to this, and they knew it. This world was atomised by mountains and the sea, yet this fragmentation produced remarkably similar societies in the eyes of the new rulers, and they were not fundamentally wrong. Its natural units

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were small places; even its great cities looked in on themselves. This inwardness did not extend to the world of commerce or constrain intellectual fertility: the Milan of Il Caffe` or the Marseille of the mercantile Clary family so adored by Napoleon were far more open to the wider world than the Parisian salons or the circumscribed universe of the provincial, landed ‘masses of granite’ so essential to the Napoleonic vision of stability.22 Rather, the insularity of the Mediterranean cities arose from their dislike of their immediate mountain hinterlands, and of interference in the running of their internal governance by any central or centralising authority. The French military commandant of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), General Bertrand, thought it ‘a city remarkable for its urbanity . . . situated amidst barbarism’, so impressed was he by its intellectual life.23 Ragusa lived in perpetual fear and loathing of the people of the Dinaric Alps around it, even as it looked to the wider world that beckoned from the sea, and even as the city sought to exploit that impoverished hinterland as best it could. Braudel pointed out how the great cities of the river valleys and the coasts dominated their local economies: not only did all roads lead to them, but ‘(a)griculture, even on a very modest scale, is dictated and directed, towards the town’.24 Here was the key to their inwardness. The great cities were fed at the expense of the countryside from political expediency, born of the inherent weakness of the small ancien re´gime state; their public granaries – the ubiquitous Annona of the Italian cities – held urban disorder at bay as best they could, but they sat cheek by jowl with commercial monopolies organised between powerful landed nobilities or rural bourgeoisies, and urban merchants, geared towards export.25 In a world of difficult local, overland communications, the greatest urban and commercial entrepoˆts of the Mediterranean were deeply dependent on a very localised hegemony. Dependence and exploitation kept alive the atavistic animosities between town and country, and between highland and lowland. This juxtaposition of inwardness and movement was mirrored in isolated upland communities, which were often centres of complex transport networks; ‘the south was the land of mule trains’ for Braudel, and it had not changed by the early nineteenth century.26 It was no coincidence that one of the most ferocious and well-supported revolts against Napoleonic rule in Italy was triggered in no small part when the valleys of the Piacentino – a vital transport route between the

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Ligurian coast and the Po valley – feared that the French were about to confiscate not only their sons for the army but their precious mules for the renewed war in the autumn of 1805.27 The communities of the Piacentino epitomise the ironies of Mediterranean upland society, if in rather stark relief. These valleys were, at once, among the most crisscrossed by commerce, and the least governed in any formal sense, in the western European Mediterranean. Notionally, they belonged to the small state of Parma-Piacenza-Guastella, under dukes whose dynasty changed with almost every major peace treaty of the early modern period. The duchy was one of the few ancien re´gime Italian states that might correspond to the stereotype spun by Mazzini: that of artificial and inept government, which engendered no deep loyalty in its people. When effective external authority touched these valleys, it came in the form of the Church, the usually ephemeral presence of local signori in Piacenza, notably the Scotti-Douglas, who had scant interest in such barren, unproductive properties, or occasional incursions of sbirri sent from Parma. The ‘state’, in terms the French had come to understand well before the Revolution, was simply an incongruity in such conditions. It was a world where even definitions of an ‘elite’ as a-statist as those of Mosca and Pareto had little meaning. The shock of the arrival of the modern state was seismic, when the valleys were incorporated into the Napoleonic empire in 1805 – 6; the immediate reaction was massive collective violence.28 Yet, the region was hardly isolated from the wider world. Its peasant hauliers ranged from the Ligurian ports to Parma, Modena and Milan. In all of this, the Piacentino represented many of the salient characteristics of upland communities across the wider imperial region of the western European Mediterranean. It was also typical in the isolated nature of its revolt. Estimates vary among contemporary authorities, but the numbers of people, men and women, who defied and fought the French in the brief life of the revolt were formidable. The most realistic assessment estimated that no less than 60,000 people had turned out in the initial moments of the revolt – a crushing acknowledgement of how heated and feared the French were – although only as few as 7,000 to 8,000 were actually able to organise themselves and sustain resistance for any time. The revolt was crushed in only a few weeks by those few troops scattered about the area, and without significant reinforcements. It did not spread beyond its core area, nor could it.29

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The atomised world created by topography made life difficult for the Napoleonic state to rule, but not to conquer. It was an old pattern, and a frustrating reminder that geography still stood in the way of real, permanent state power, and significant reforms could be brought about only by genuine institutional control. The cultural battle lines were drawn along the contour lines which had shaped human history. Braudel remarked that ‘The Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is the sum of individual histories. If these histories assume in the course of research, different values, different meanings, their sum must perforce change too’.30 The French embarked on not only a course of conquest but of research, the better to master this world of many voices. Some of those voices spoke in the favour of the imperial enterprise; others rose up in fury against it; others, still, hoped to adapt and prosper in a new order. The French, however, always answered with one voice, that of institutional uniformity and a sure sense of cultural superiority, in any and all circumstances. The sole exception to this was in the fragmented context of Spain, where French control outside Catalonia and Castile depended on individual marshals, not intellectual bureaucrats: while Soult pursued a conventional Napoleonic policy of building new institutions on the French template in Andalusia, Suchet broke with this in Valencia, where he actively sustained the feudal nobility and relied greatly on their cooperation outside the cities.31 Only in the last years of this hegemony did signs emerge of pragmatism on the part of the regime, and even then, only in aid of longer-term assimilation to a rigid imperial template. Before this policy is explored and the intellectual world that fostered it is analysed, it is useful to examine the very concrete ways in which Napoleonic policy gave real meaning to the western European Mediterranean as an imperial macro-region. That definition emerged from very negative, very deliberate policies.

Creating a region: Sealing the boundaries In any regional study, there is always the issue of space, of boundaries. Braudel sought to be everywhere, to seek out the enduring tides of history, and he succeeded. This volume can only be a pale tribute to his achievement, and it in no way attempts to be comprehensive in any respect, least of all in its territorial scope. The Napoleonic Mediterranean was itself but a fragment of the region, even in the

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narrowest of definitions, that of the geographer, which Braudel saw as ‘the most familiar and the most restrictive: for him, the Mediterranean region stretches from the northern limit of the olive tree to the northern limit of the palm tree’.32 Modern geographers have moved on from these strictures, as did Braudel, but the Napoleonic Mediterranean, although smaller even than the boundaries Braudel detested, still comprised a significant segment of the inland sea. Its new French rulers had a very uneven grasp of their new hegemony, and the knowledge of even those parts of it they felt they knew had come down to them from deeply prejudiced eyes. If Iberia and, even more, what became ‘Illyria’ feature little in this particular chapter, it is because they were almost terra incognita to the French on the eve of imperial expansion: neither region was on the Grand Tour; their culture, past or present, held no interest for the French intelligentsia. They scarcely knew where their future Illyrian provinces were, and were never clear in their own minds whether Slovenian and Croatian were distinct languages.33 The preparations for Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 are a stark revelation of just how ill-informed the French were about the country they had been allied to by blood for most of the previous one hundred years. If the Italian peninsula was a case of superficial familiarity breeding contempt, Iberia was one of pure caricature underpinning high politics. ‘At the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . Spain and its inhabitants had a deplorable image in France’, in Thierry Lentz’ clear but understated prose.34 Louis Roederer had, at least, visited Spain, but he returned with an utterly contemptuous opinion of what he had seen: ‘I have never known such poverty born of sloth . . . than I have seen in Spain and Naples . . . .’35 Roederer would play a major role in ruling both, under Napoleon. At least Naples was deemed to possess enough ancient splendour to merit attention: not so Spain. The Spanish plains, coasts and lowlands were sunk in decadence; the people of the barely accessible highlands were regarded by the French as ‘cruel, savage and xenophobic . . . From a twentieth century point of view, this is so much dross’, in the direct style of Charles Esdaile.36 The French who came to rule in 1808 came by their ‘dross’ honestly, however. It was the confection of the high Enlightenment, spiced by travellers’ tales. Nor was it confined to a vision of a savage rural world, as Roederer’s remarks reveal. Montesquieu may have praised the Spanish for their honesty in The Spirit of the Laws in the early 1740s, but he qualified his praise

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heavily: ‘this admirable quality, joined to their indolence, forms a mixture whence such effects result as to them are most pernicious.’37 The French simply ignored Spain for all but commercial and diplomatic purposes until they chose to seize it in 1808. The relative familiarity and ignorance of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas emerged at its most tangible in the conduct of the first Italian campaign of 1796, and the invasion of Spain in 1808: the French armies had a clear knowledge of the terrain in the former campaign, but often found themselves adrift and bewildered during the latter. Nevertheless, Roederer, the Napoleonic imperialist par excellence, still lumped Naples and Spain together in his contempt, just as Esdaile’s correct assessment of French views of the Spanish peasantry, un-nuanced by regional variation, was replicated in their opinion of the Italian periphery. As varied as the western Mediterranean might be in reality, its micro-regions were readily lumped together in the eyes of its new rulers. Their geographic vision of their meridional possessions was as narrow as their opinion of its peoples: Napoleonic policy was predicated on ‘sealing’ the Mediterranean portion of his hegemony by means of the Continental Blockade. Even here, the Napoleonic ‘sealing’ of the Mediterranean reveals the continued relevance of Braudel’s conception. Braudel looked on Roman antiquity as the greatest period of ‘Mediterranean unity’, but his perspective led him to consider this unity as having a very negative corollary: Rome succeeded in converting the Mediterranean world in the strict sense into what was almost a closed system, setting up as it were locks on all the routes in and out of it, and thereby abandoning (perhaps mistakenly) the possibility of controlling the outer limits of Europe . . . and of establishing free and profitable relations with . . . distant civilisations. But this possibility of lockbuilding, which was only relatively effective in any case, has been the exception rather than the rule in Mediterranean history.38 The Napoleonic empire sought to be the heir of Rome in many ways, ways which stretched far beyond superficial iconography into the very nature of imperial rule built on concepts of law and citizenship. Yet, Braudel’s vision of a Rome which attempted to seal the inland sea, to choke off its networks and isolate it – and in its failure

INTRODUCTION

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to do so – provide an even more exact parallel between these two imperialist aberrations in Mediterranean history. The twin prongs of Napoleonic economic warfare, the Blockade and the Continental System, were, of course, pan-European policies; the Blockade was meant to extend along the entire coastline of western Europe, and the Continental System envisaged a complete reordering of European trade and commerce, away from the Atlantic and Mediterranean sea routes, and so from British competition, towards an economically dominant France. The coastal economies of the western European Mediterranean were not alone in feeling the impact of the Blockade, just as the wider economic life of the whole region was not singular in its responses to the Continental System, for good and ill. Nevertheless, the impacts of both these policies did have particular influences on the Mediterranean, differences dictated by geography and the human history it moulded, as much as by Napoleon’s intentions. The key to understanding its particular experience lies in the very essence of Braudel’s vision: in the Mediterranean, the mountains lie close to the coasts. Thus, to blockade the sea was not enough to enforce the Blockade; the mountain passes also had to be controlled, and the world of the mule train had to be choked, as well as that of the transport ship. In much of northern Europe, this was not the case. The Blockade proved porous everywhere, and the coasts of the North Sea were at least as overrun by contraband during the Napoleonic wars as those of the Mediterranean, if not more so. The real problem for the Napoleonic empire did not lie here. Rather, in their need to blockade commerce, the new empire stirred up the dark, natural rebelliousness of the mountain. Braudel did not invent the concept of ‘mountain freedom’, but he crystallised it: ‘The hills were the refuge of liberty, democracy and peasant “republics”.’39 When Napoleon attempted to shut off not only the roads of the sea but the mule tracks, he opened up another front in his great war, and engaged with an enemy who had seen off all comers, Rome included. The revolt of the Piacentino – well before the Berlin and Milan decrees were issued – was a foretaste of what was to come, yet as soon as resistance to this assault on the natural order of things was crushed, the mountain communities quickly returned to the subterfuge of smuggling, drawing on centuries of experience in eluding and defying outside authority and control. Napoleon stirred old demons when he turned his attention from the coasts to the mountains. His intention was

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THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

to seal off the region from Europe beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees, allowing commercial relations on no terms but his own. He failed miserably, but on one level it was an important attempt to define the ‘Napoleonic Mediterranean’ within the wider context of his hegemony; on another, it defined the region in a way he did not intend, through the atavistic, regionally specific forms that resistance to the Blockade assumed. On yet another, the attempt to apply the Continental System to the region showed how unnatural the new region was, at least in the context of economic life. Napoleon’s first permanent incursions into the Mediterranean outside the borders of France were in his creation of the Republic of Italy in 1800, and his annexation of the mainland territories of the House of Savoy, the Italian region of Piedmont, two years later. ‘Italy’, both Republic and Kingdom, was always the jewel in the imperial crown, and Piedmont proved one of the best integrated parts of the empire as time progressed. Napoleon had a decided admiration for the elites of both regions, if for very different reasons, as will be explored below. All this notwithstanding, neither the cherished status of the satellite state nor the direct annexation of the Piedmontese departments to France led to the dismantling of the pre-Napoleonic customs barriers; even when Liguria was annexed to France in 1805, the old customs line between Liguria and Piedmont was also retained. Commerce with the Napoleonic Mediterranean and ‘the interior’, as ‘old France’ was referred to by the imperial bureaucracy, was to be regulated in French interests, and so the old barriers remained. Smuggling and legitimate transport alike travelled over passes, large and small, famous and known only to locals. This was not just the origins of Geoffrey Ellis’s ‘uncommon market’, but the first campaign in the war against the mule train. As such, it defined the region on two levels, and would continue do to so. This policy of retaining the old barriers, and of erecting new ones where none had existed before Napoleonic rule, intensified and spread. It reached its apex in the Trianon Tariff treaties and the Fontainebleau decree of 1810, which both tightened the ‘customs terror’, and confirmed the customs lines around France.40 These regulations cut off most of the German and Dutch parts of the empire from the privileged tariff zone, as well as the Mediterranean possessions, and formed part of a pan-European policy; nevertheless, they did much to define the Mediterranean part of the empire, and are an almost eerie echo of the Roman ‘sealing’ Braudel depicts.

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This ‘border war’ between France and the Mediterranean was fought less on the coasts than in the mountains, along the transportations routes that led to the traditional internal markets of southern Germany and France itself, which Napoleon had to protect if the Continental System was to become a reality. This is to say nothing of the Blockade, for as Geoffrey Ellis has recently pointed out, inland internal markets were intended as the lynchpin of an economic system which gravitated towards France, and their existence was essential to the French economy under Napoleonic hegemony.41 Now, the new front of the new war became those ‘stopping places’ Braudel discerned as essential to the networks which connected the towns and cities of the Mediterranean, often, he remarked, ‘the lonely inn’, but most often, the town.42 Route centres and innkeepers often formed the backbone of resistance to the new boundaries, along with the bandit-smugglers who led the mule trains. Michele Pezza (aka Fra Diavolo) in the Abruzzi, the Narzole band of the Piedmontese– Ligurian borderlands, Espoz y Mina in Navarre, Jean Peyro in Roussillon, were all men of the haulage trade who dabbled in smuggling before Napoleonic rule, and emerged as banditsmugglers and guerrilla leaders during it. Andreas Hofer, the legendary leader of the Tyrolean revolt, was an innkeeper, the kind of man who ‘watered’ both hauliers and mules. They were, in a real sense, the frontline troops on the borders of a new Europe that had to be resisted. The resistance to this ‘sealing’ of the mule trails breathed new life into the traditional banditry based on smuggling that had been part of the life of the mountains since time immemorial and, until or if it was broken by the French, it extended support for illegal commerce well beyond its normal bounds, binding whole communities in active support for the maintenance of the life blood of this most natural part of the Mediterranean economy. The mercantilism of most ancien re´gime states ensured that smuggling was an atavistic activity in the western Mediterranean. It allowed a deeply rooted culture of insubordination and defiance of authority in those communities directly involved in it, but not in ways that threatened the foundations of the state. Smuggling during the ancien re´gime was not directed at undermining constituted authority, merely avoiding it, although there were moments when the state took a different view, and reacted with concerted ferocity. The ‘Salt Wars’ of the late seventeenth century in Piedmont are a striking instance of this,43 but they were the exception, not the rule, usually because the

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ancien re´gime states were too weak to sustain such levels of coercion. When Napoleon transformed mercantilism into the cornerstone of a pan-European war against the British, and when he made France the sole focus of commerce and manufacturing, all to foster internal markets in its favour, he transformed smuggling into a battle for survival, rather than a lucrative component of the economy. Its bastions had to fall if Napoleon was to win his great war, as well as simply to assert his authority on the peripheries of the Mediterranean. Smuggling may or may not have become politicised in the eyes of its practitioners – and in many cases, it seems to have evolved in this way – but it was of the deepest political concern to the new regime. Many of the political borders of Napoleonic Italy were wholly new and unprecedented, but the new economic imperial order rocked old frontiers as well as new. As Peter Sahlins and Michel Brunet have shown, the Catalan Pyrenees, French and Spanish alike, became foyers of defiance throughout the period.44 In the case of Catalonia, the creation of the Napoleonic Mediterranean by ‘sealing’ well-established borders more tightly tuned the previously accepted ‘fossilised’ frontiers into contested spaces. The same was true along the borders of the Kingdom of Italy and the Helvetic Confederation (Switzerland), where a well-established border existed before Napoleonic rule, even if it underwent several modifications in the period. This was also the case along the old border between the Republic of Venice and the Tyrol, and it became still more intense when the former was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy and the latter to Bavaria in 1806. Here, Napoleonic economic imperialism struck directly at the heart of ‘Alpine societies and villages (which) seem to have existed for the express purpose of organising the crossing of the mountains and furthering the progress of . . . profitable traffic in both directions, south and north,’ as Braudel put it.45 They proved formidable enemies. Along the Swiss– Italian frontier, the traditional ‘stopping places’ of Bellinzona and Tincino became virtual warehouses for smuggled goods. As Alex Grab has pointed out, the terrain simply made these areas impossible to police.46 Louis Bonaparte, expelled from the throne of Holland by his brother, in large part for failing to enforce the Blockade, later remarked of its impact on Spain: Contraband was, in a way, almost in the atmosphere of the maritime provinces of Spain, and had become a reliable, lucrative

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business for their young, entrepreneurial men. The rigorous enforcement of the Continental System to the ports and coasts of the peninsula was, thus, nothing less than a revolution for the financial, economic and moral (system) of this great country.47 The Napoleonic ‘sealing’ of the Mediterranean was an unnatural act. Braudel, referring to the sixteenth century, saw the fundamental nature of the Alps not as a barrier but as a natural link between southern Germany and northern Italy: ‘Southern Germany grew up and matured in the shadow of the greatness of northern Italy’.48 By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the relationship had matured to the extent that the roles may have been in the process of being reversed, but it was still fundamental to both regions. No one saw this more clearly than the respective rulers of the Kingdom of Italy, Eugene de Beauharnais, and that of Bavaria, Max-Josef and his chief minister, Montgelas. They made several abortive attempts to frame commercial agreements to keep this atavistic trading network alive, but were thwarted by Napoleon who stifled it by a treaty forced on them in 1808.49 The business community of Munich retorted with a remonstrance 56 pages long;50 in 1809, at the first realistic opportunity, the Tyrol rose in revolt, ironically against a Bavarian state which the rebels felt had become a clone of Napoleonic France, and much of north-eastern Italy rose with it. Max-Josef and Eugene were Napoleon’s loyalist collaborators; their respective states proved better partners in empire than many parts of ‘old France’, but they saw their most natural relationships ‘sealed’, as Napoleon ‘forced’ the definition of a region. Its unnatural character was epitomised by the revolts of 1809, which spanned the artificial border and made it a war zone. The inland sea had changed since the sixteenth century, the era of Braudel’s research, when he could still speak of man’s efforts as having ‘only conquered a few coastal margins’, leaving ‘great stretches of the sea . . . as empty as the Sahara’.51 Navigation and more sophisticated techniques of shipbuilding had made the centre of the Mediterranean a busy transport route, even as the place of the region in the context of world trade was declining. The inland sea was a much used waterway, well beyond its coastlines, at the moment it was dragged into the heart of the naval rivalry between Britain and France in the course of the Napoleonic wars. This confrontation between the two incongruously

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matched rivals for domination in the Western world is a conflict which is genuinely part of a longue dure´e, of which its Napoleonic phase proved the final decisive act. The Mediterranean sea had been deeply involved in the wars of the eighteenth century; this was the period when the British acquired Gibraltar, and the French Bourbons the throne of Spain, together with its considerable navy and, at one remove in familial terms, that of Naples, together with Sicily and nominal control of the Straits of Messina. These changes all played pivotal roles in the Napoleonic wars in the inland sea. The sea war was one the British were better placed to win, and they did so. After Trafalgar, Napoleon was forced to turn to blockade to thwart the British, knowingly retreating to the land, and ceding Britain the sea. The ‘sealing’ was a sign of weakness, as Silvia Marzagalli has acutely observed.52 The Mediterranean was now choked off from the commerce it had built up in the intervening centuries between Braudel’s assessment and the late eighteenth century, as Napoleon attempted to close the ports, and the British countered him by cutting the Mediterranean into three sections: the Royal Navy created a line of bases from Corfu, in the east – to control the passage from the Adriatic to the central sea routes – through Sicily and Malta, as the pivots of its frontline, through to the Balearics, to Gibraltar and, after 1809, Cadiz. Only traffic the British permitted passed this line, which severed east from west, and also, more importantly from a Napoleonic perspective, cut off the French, Spanish, Italian and, briefly, ‘Illyrian’ coasts from all but the contraband trade fostered by the British from Malta, which became a huge entrepoˆt for officially sanctioned smuggling, in a mirror image of the role played by Heligoland in the North Sea.53 The pattern had been set early in the period, when British sea power forced Napoleon out of Egypt, and then, in 1802– 3, when he was powerless to prevent them retaining Malta, in defiance of the terms of the Peace of Amiens. In economic terms, all this meant that normal maritime commerce was displaced by contraband across the Napoleonic Mediterranean from its source in Malta to the coasts, and then on across Braudel’s ‘isthmuses’ over the mountains,54 as conveyed by the bandit-smugglers. At no other time, save perhaps during World War II, was the region so cut off from its lifeblood of the sea, for the Blockade and, even more, the British counter-blockade, had ‘sealed off’ the western Mediterranean to the south and east. It was a surreal economic world, wholly artificial, and corresponded well to

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Braudel’s belief in the transience of ‘surface disturbances’. Normal service was indeed resumed after 1814, yet these events also mark the moment when it was abundantly clear that Britain could do what it liked on the inland sea for the foreseeable future. The Mediterranean proved the arena where this world order was most emphatically demonstrated. This anomalous moment in the history of the Mediterranean formed part of a very real longue dure´e. British dominance of the sea was used to prosecute active military assaults on the region, as well as economic warfare. There were 840 vessels based in Malta by 1811, five times more than when war was renewed in 1803, with a powerful naval squadron to protect their smuggling activities.55 Sicily was an even easier point of entry for British contraband; the Straits of Messina were a very narrow gap between this burgeoning British entrepoˆt and the ill-defended recalcitrant region of Calabria, where its baronage – long hostile to the French – deployed their brigand retainers to facilitate the hugely profitable trade, and where even senior French officials were drawn into it. The trade then extended north throughout the Kingdom of Naples and into the Roman departments, some of it eventually reaching Milan.56 This was the most peaceable face of the navy’s presence, however. From its bases across the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy launched pinprick after pinprick against the Frenchheld coasts, first from Sicily against Calabria, after Napoleon placed Joseph on the throne of Naples in 1806; effective control of the coasts, coupled with determined campaigns against increasingly isolated, unsupported bandits, sealed the coasts of the Mezzogiorno from both sides for much of the period.57 Amphibious warfare was renewed, with considerably more success, along the Spanish Levant from 1810 onwards, using Cadiz – besieged by land quite effectively by the French – as what Agustı´n Guimera has likened to an aircraft carrier.58 Troops and supplies were ferried along the coast to bolster local anti-French resistance in eastern Spain and sustain guerrilla forces which otherwise might not have survived the increasingly potent counter-insurgency campaigns of Soult and Suchet. So successful was the Anglo-Spanish blockade of the Levant that the French were forced to ‘run’ it themselves, sending out their own privateers from south-western ports in attempts to supply Barcelona, in almost a mirror image of the circumstances at Cadiz.59 These tactics were repeated with even greater success in the Adriatic, where it proved impossible for the French to control the Dalmatian archipelago.

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The presence of the Royal Navy did more than facilitate smuggling, although it did not result in direct support for local rebellions, in contrast to Spain. Rather, the shield of British naval protection from Corfu allowed the islands of the Adriatic coast to become havens for deserters and refractory conscripts, and for whole villages from the mainland, intent on avoiding French taxation or collective punishment.60 Amphibious warfare thus became a defining element in the ‘sealing’ of the Napoleonic Mediterranean, as did its French response, counter-insurgency. The coasts became flashpoints of conflict, but also those areas where natural life was most deranged, as trade routes were cut off to all but contraband and military operations. Amphibious warfare had its limits tested along these coasts, however. A large-scale invasion of French-occupied Catalonia, organised in Sicily and launched from the Balearics under Bentinck in the summer of 1813, met with scant success.61 Likewise, Murat’s hopes to invade Sicily across the Straits of Messina came to nothing; although Napoleon allowed him to assemble a force of 17,000 men for the project in the spring of 1810, it was only as a diversionary tactic, for a detailed report made in late 1809 had easily convinced Napoleon that an amphibious operation on such a scale was unfeasible, even over so narrow a stretch of water as the Straits of Messina.62 The unparalleled sulphur deposits around Etna, so near yet so far from Napoleon’s grasp, remained the monopoly of the gunners of the Royal Navy. Logistics on both sides could not actually break the deadlock of the ‘sealed’ coasts. Ironically, while the inland sea was systematically strangled by both powers, its major Atlantic ports in Iberia remained open to normal trade, under British protection, and flourished, at least in comparison to the fates of Barcelona, Marseille, Livorno or Ragusa. This contrast underlines the negative but emphatic definition of the boundaries of a western European Mediterranean created by Napoleonic imperialism. The creation of much, but not all, of the Napoleonic Mediterranean corresponds perfectly to the persuasive thesis of Sylvia Marzagalli, for the fundamental impetus behind Napoleonic expansionism: The selection of European regions integrated into the empire and Continental System did not derive from a pre-existing perception of affinities which might have fostered more consensual and multifaceted amalgamation; rather, it was determined by sheer

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considerations of necessity – the necessity of forcing Great Britain to peace . . . (T)he incapacity of the French state to effectively implement anti-British economic measures determined the typology, geography and chronology of Napoleonic imperialist ambitions 63 Put another way, the need to enforce the Blockade and make the Continental System a reality, bestowed an ‘outer empire’, composed of unassimilable territories upon France; the needs of economic warfare did more than anything else to drive France past the early gains predicated upon the spurious doctrine of ‘natural frontiers’ and beyond a ring of natural allies such as the original membership of the Confederation of the Rhine. The invasions of Iberia – first of Portugal and then of Spain – and the occupation of the Illyrian provinces, together with the annexation of much of the Italian peninsula, correspond well to Marzagalli’s logic that Napoleonic hegemony after 1805 was shaped out of weakness, not strength. This emerged not just by being driven away from the Atlantic by British sea power but through the acquisition of an untenable land empire in the region. Significantly, the two components of the Napoleonic Mediterranean acquired before the initiation of the Blockade do not fit this model: the mainland Italian possessions of the House of Savoy, which became five French departments in 1802, and the Lombard-Modenese core of the Italian Republic in 1800, re-founded from the 1796 Cisapline Republic. Despite the disruption of the Blockade and the injustices of the Continental System, the economic life of these regions returned to something like normal in the course of Napoleonic rule; although some sectors of the economy fared better than others, life was not dominated by the unnatural dependence on smuggling, as it was elsewhere.64 This assimilation did not come easily: far from it. Both regions were not fully pacified until about 1807, and even afterwards, there were serious threats to their internal security. Nor was Napoleonic rule ever universally popular. Nevertheless, the Napoleonic reforms in these regions were not regarded as ‘alien’ or unfathomable by the indigenous elites and, even if they were debated and contested in their particulars, they found a general acceptance absent in much of the rest of the Napoleonic Mediterranean. Livio Antonielli has expressed this lucidly, in the context of the Italian Republic:

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If seen on the level of communication, and from the reaction of the elites, the prevalent sense is one of . . . the possibility of understanding between reciprocal proposals, between those imposed by the French, and those which were put forward by the Italians . . . the elites were perfectly capable of evaluating the consequences and of understanding the machinery of how (the French reforms) worked.65 Indeed, the contiguous territories of the Piedmontese imperial departments and the Republic/Kingdom of Italy (excepting its Venetian territories acquired in 1807), might be said to have become the pivot of Napoleonic hegemony in the Mediterranean, the only parts of the region securely under French control. They became integral parts of the Napoleonic empire to the point that they may reasonably be regarded as more useful to Napoleon than many parts of France itself, vast swathes of the Midi and the Vendean departments especially. As Antonielli has indicated however, they participated actively in the life of the empire, and French influence here stretched far beyond secure control of territory. Indeed, the Lombard core of the Republic/Kingdom may be seen as the jewel in Napoleon’s European crown, so valued did it become for him, not just at the outset of his career when the chance of conquest allowed him to turn it into his own power base but continuously thereafter, when he came to evaluate it in wider, imperial terms. Nevertheless, even as Antonielli emphasises the mutual compatibility of the Lombard elites to the essence French reforms, he is adamant that there were different regional responses to them within the borders of the Kingdom: the Venetian and former papal territories showed markedly less inclination to engage with Napoleonic ideas. Thus, Antonielli concludes, there were ‘many Italys’ to be confronted in the course of empire-building, perhaps an echo of Braudel’s ‘many voices’.66 This is just as important for grasping the nature of imperial rule in the Napoleonic Mediterranean as the presence of potential compatibility with the new regime. If significant regional differences were present within the Republic/Kingdom of Italy, they were writ larger still in the reactions of many of the imperial departments of Italy, to say nothing of Spain or ‘Illyria’. Braudel’s ‘many voices of the Mediterranean’ were a collective reality the French had to contend with.

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Cultural imperialism: Ruling the Napoleonic Mediterranean Montesquieu: ‘Mission impossible’ Conquering and sealing off the region was one thing. Ruling it was quite another. The Napoleonic regime demanded significantly more of its subjects than any previous political culture. Its material demands on them for the war effort, be they in conscripts for the conventional war or the massacre of commerce for the economic war, were without precedent. Its imperial vision was what made so many shudder, however. The cultural transformation it sought was comparable only with the Catholic Reformation, in its ambitions for the moral regeneration, and so for fundamental change, of the peoples it governed. The empire had been acquired by force majeure, out of necessity born of desperation, but how it was to be governed stemmed from deeply meditated principles. The Napoleonic regime was yet another wave of civilisation, colliding with a longue dure´e hardened, as it were, to such things. However, the collision became so serious and often so violent, because the French were the most determined and powerful civilisers of all. Napoleon’s Mediterranean possessions were but part of a wider empire, and the French had a very clear ‘moral geography’ of Europe, and of the Mediterranean’s place in it. When it acquired so diverse a hegemony, the Napoleonic generation had an intellectual tradition to draw upon, and it duly did so. The French ruled through unshakeable prejudice, and they came by it honestly, from no less a canonical source than Montesquieu. Montesquieu’s judgements – for this they were, not mere observations – made on his tour of Italy in the late 1720s, were scathing, both of Italian moeurs and of its political milieu. In 1728, he lambasted Ligurian political culture on precisely the same terms as those of French imperial administrators, three-quarters of a century later: Above all (here exist) the most iniquitous tribunals on earth. There is no protection from a noble who is after your property, your honour or your life. If you have the misfortune to offend one of them, the punishment will be merciless.67 In the same year, he was even more un-nuanced on the government of the Venetian Republic, saying bluntly that ‘It is in such a state of decadence, that it is scarcely even kept a secret anymore’.68 He went on

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to castigate the morality of the Venetian elite in the exact phraseology employed by the French administrators of Florence and Rome, almost 80 years hence: The courtesans ply their trade in the churches . . . As for liberty, they enjoy a kind of liberty that honest men would not wish to have: to be seen about with women of pleasure in the plain of day; to marry them; to avoid Easter; to be wholly anonymous and free in their actions: this is the liberty they have.69 The prejudices the French brought with them over the Alps were deeply rooted, and were more often re-enforced, than softened or discarded, in the course of Napoleonic rule. Montesquieu’s visions of a decadent culture went far deeper than the passing disparagement of the traveller’s tale, however. They carried far more intellectual weight than most accounts of the Grand Tour because they were the empirical observations upon which he built a concept of the meridional world, and of Europe as a whole, which won almost universal acceptance among successive generations of educated Frenchmen, as Roberto Dainotto has forcefully reminded modern scholarship.70 Dainotto has drawn proper attention to the manner in which Montesquieu reoriented the concept of a European ‘Other’ from an Aristotelian Orient ‘. . . onto a part, or moment, of the European self . . . (T)he Orient was the south, and Europe’s Other was to be found, as in a nightmare, within Europe’s own borders’.71 Indeed, for many educated Frenchmen, the Orient, and China especially, became something of an idyll, particularly in the hands of Voltaire.72 On one level, Voltaire attacked Mohammed in his play ‘Fanaticism’, but he also portrayed him as a reformer, when faced with the Europe of ‘the dark ages’: I come, after a thousand years, to change these ridiculous laws; I bring a nobler yoke to whole nations. I abolish their false gods; and purified religion . . . is of the highest order.73 Islamic civilisation fared much better in his 1756 Histoire des croisades, where it was contrasted sharply and favourably with the fanaticism and barbarism of the Latins. For the Napoleonic generation, this positive

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vision did not survive the direct experiences of the Egyptian campaign,74 but this did not mean that they abandoned Montesquieu’s theory of the European south as ‘the Other within’. Far from it. Indeed, the French experience of the Napoleonic occupation of Italy is dominated by an entrenchment and refinement of exactly this vision. Montesquieu found the root of the ills of the south in its climate, and this made his disdain for both the meridional public sphere and the private morals of its elites, ‘of a piece’, as it were: they arose from the same fundamental ill, a ‘soft’ climate which, in turn, corrupted the human as well as the physical environment if left unchecked: ‘(M)an is like a source of energy’, he wrote with direct reference to the Venetians, ‘which works best, when it is contained’.75 Evidently, for Montesquieu neither the states of the ancien re´gime, nor the Church of the Catholic Reformation, had been able to do this, and had actually become significant parts of the problem. In Dainotto’s succinct analysis, ‘Social relations, which constitute the positive laws that relate individual bodies to the general political body of the nation, were in turn predetermined by natural relations, and natural laws’.76 The intractability of meridional degeneracy was evident, even among the Romans. Montesquieu’s Conside´rations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur de´cadence of 1727 is peppered with disparaging comparisons between the Italy of antiquity and that of the Grand Tour. Montesquieu regarded the extension of Roman citizenship, and so the right to participate in politics, to other peoples of Italy, as a mistake for the Republic, and he could not help but remark: ‘How can one hope to imagine this monstrous head of the peoples of Italy running the rest of the world’.77 His most cutting and chilling judgements came in the continuity he found between the Roman masses and the Neapolitan lazzaroni of his own day, however: The Roman populace, who had ceased to take part in government, (was) composed . . . of unemployed people, who lived at public expense, and felt nothing but their impotence; they bemoaned their sense of powerlessness like women and children . . . There are, today, 50,000 men in Naples who (are) . . . the most wretched on earth, and who fall into the most terrible depression at the slightest puff of smoke from Vesuvius; they are stupid enough to fear becoming unfortunate.78

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Montesquieu’s disparagement of the Italy he encountered was not directed at ‘the savage mountain’, as the Grand Tour regarded the Alps and Apennines simply as unpleasant barriers to be crossed, or avoided if possible. His spleen was directed at the great cities, at what might be seen as the cradle of European civilisation itself. He, like his compatriots after him, believed the Catholic Reformation to have been retrograde, and the influence of antiquity as, at the very least, mixed.79 Montesquieu prefigured the belief of the French, hitherto unique among foreign rulers of Italy, that decadence dominated its urban culture, and was just as much to be reformed as the isolated highlands. The longevity and power of Montesquieu’s influence abounds in the copious correspondence of the French in Napoleonic Italy, who were his intellectual heirs in so many respects. Montesquieu’s boundaries of a ‘worthy’ Europe of the north extended further into the Italian peninsula than did those of the Napoleonic imperialists, who saw corruption all around them. Montesquieu believed that northern Italy ‘belonged’ to northern Europe climatically, because it was shielded from the Mediterranean heat by the Apennines, and so belonged to the ‘temperate zone’. He traced it with great precision: the Apennines prevented a hot wind, the Sirocco – ‘the intelligence that presides over all Italian heads’ – from penetrating those of the Lombards and Piedmontese, and made them people of the north. ‘The havoc of the Sirocco’ was the curse of the south; it was the Apennines which created ‘the difference one notices’ in the northern Italians.80 For all its sweeping determinism which appears almost crass in contemporary eyes, Montesquieu’s exercise in such pinpoint geographic determinism traced the contours of the very real ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Napoleonic empires in Italy: this boundary marked, in practice, where Napoleonic institutions were comprehended accurately within their Mediterranean hegemony, even if their rule was not always embraced with alacrity, and those regions where their reforms fell on deaf or angry ears. At least, this was how the Emperor and most senior ministers in Paris viewed it, evidenced by the faith they put in the Piedmontese, within the empire, proper, to govern the rest of Italy and even to hold powerful positions in Paris. It was still more notable in the central role Napoleon accorded the Republic/Kingdom of Italy, within the wider imperial framework, and his willingness to accord the most senior positions in its government to Italians. In the face of opposition from the French Conseil d’E´tat,

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Napoleon entrusted the electoral colleges of the Italian Republic with far more influence and prestige than he did those of France. Their extensive advisory role showed the confidence he placed in the local elites of Lombardy, Modena and the Emilia-Romagna, just as his insistence on the creation of only three: in Milan, Bologna and Brescia. Thus, they were more concentrated, and representing much vaster areas, partly coterminus with ancien re´gime divisions.81 This displayed a sensitivity to Italian regionalism in the Emperor notably lacking in his imperial servants. Many French officials on the ground in the Italian departments had far less confidence in the capacity of their Piedmontese colleagues for assimilation, as witnessed by the career of Ferdinando Dal Pozzo. The point is less the influence of geography and climate, in general, or in that of the Sirocco, in particular, on the human condition, but in the fact that there were real territorial divisions within Napoleonic Italy, and that they influenced the way it was ruled. Montesquieu’s ‘Sirocco line’ ignores the significant differences between mountain and plain, between the Po valley and its upland peripheries, which shaped the internal geography of his designated ‘north’, just as it ignores the possibility that the Italian states of the ancien re´gime had much in common, before the divisions imposed by Napoleonic domination.82 The complexities of history, of human agency, were the real causes of the differing responses of the future Italian north and south to Napoleonic rule; histoire e´ve´nementielle determined for how long, and under what circumstances, north and south came to experience Napoleonic rule.83 Nevertheless, however artificial, a north– south divide which traced the line of the Apennines and the northern limit of the ‘havoc of the Sirocco’ was embraced by Italians themselves, and governed the minds of the elites of the unitary state far more than it ever did those of the French.84 Some contemporaries were quick to see that Montesquieu had given potential French imperialists the stereotypes of ‘the Other’ that would serve them well in the cause of empire. Climate had decreed the innate superiority of the peoples of the temperate zones.85 That became the worry of Napoleonic imperialists, as the tides of war and the exigencies of the Blockade made meridional empire a pressing reality for a generation of Frenchmen steeped in Montesquieu. Montesquieu was no guide for the imperialist, however. His denunciations of ‘empire’ as an exercise in futility have often been seen as fundamentally rooted in his critique of the French overseas ventures of

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his own times, and he believed overseas colonialism to be a closed chapter in European history by the mid eighteenth century. Differences of climate doomed such enterprises to failure, in his eyes.86 Chillingly, both Montesquieu and the French Empire-builders in Italy, worried that the Roman exercise in empire-building was doomed not by anything the Romans did, as much as the fact that the southern climate overcame all their best efforts. Their civil institutions long gave them the foundations of a vibrant society, capable of greatness and self-sacrifice, but they ruled over a world of plenty, and always despised commerce and the arts – the preserve of slaves – and when their political and social institutions failed, the natural softness and plenty of their Mediterranean empire enveloped them. The singularity of the Romans was that the last virtue to disappear was their capacity for war, ‘something which, I believe, has never happened to any other Nation on earth’.87 There were inherent dangers to expansion, even within Europe, and these dictums haunted the French as they pondered how the Roman past had been reduced to ruins. Montesquieu’s sense of futility in the practical task of regenerating the ‘south’, of assimilating ‘it’ to a French, Napoleonic ‘north’, sat always on the shoulders of the imperialists. It was the price they paid for admitting his displacement of a very alien, Aristotlian ‘Orient’, by a very familiar, proximate, European, indigenous ‘Other’. Montesquieu was less their bad conscience, than their Cassandra.

Enlightened imperialism: Raynal, Voltaire and the roots of the civilising mission Montesquieu offered negatives, not hope. His message was to turn away from a task that had to be undertaken under Napoleon. Yet it was evident to the French that no other part of their hegemony was in need of a civilising mission than their meridional possessions. Both the decadent centres and the savage peripheries demanded more from their new rulers than mere governance; a social revolution was calling them. As hommes re´ge´ne´re´s, themselves, sprung from their own successful revolution, they could not ignore this and merely behave as a more ruthless, efficient ancien re´gime. Conscripts and taxes would be wrung from the Mediterranean – or, at least, from those parts of it the French could master – but the character of their rule did not stop at this. For incentive, if not quite hope, Napoleon’s imperial servants turned to Voltaire. They were not the first to do so. In contrast to his use of similar

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climatic arguments in the cause of anti-slavery, Montesquieu’s emphatic arguments against imperialist expansion fell on deaf ears, even among other philosophes.88 As Sankar Muthu has shown in great depth, all but a sporadic minority of enlightened thinkers ever rejected the idea of empire, seeing in it a means to spread civilisation.89 The philosophes were deeply concerned with colonialism and the place of a civilising mission within it in the second half of the eighteenth century. No scholar has done more to elucidate this than Miche`le Duchet.90 A powerfully influential current among the philosophes coupled, almost prophetically, the imperatives of ruling a colonial empire in the New World and the Indian Ocean, with an interest in the efforts of the contemporary rulers of Russia, Peter I and Catherine II, to modernise a European society they did not hesitate to call barbarous. Pessimism, rooted in Montesquieu, dominated the thought of De Pauw and others, who felt the peoples of the New World and Russia were doomed to remain incapable of civilisation by the pervasive power of their physical environment. However, others, led by Raynal and Diderot, saw the challenge differently. In the course of the compilation of their History of the Two Indies, they redefined the narrative of the Spanish conquest of the New World in several ways which set new aspirations for imperial rule: the brutality and stupidity of the Spanish conquerors was never denied, but this arose from the cultural backwardness of Spain, an opinion which Voltaire shared. The problem was not, however, the conquest itself, for Native American society – even in Central America and the Andes – was recast as so primitive and savage that its fall to the Europeans was a historical inevitability. The crime was no longer colonial rule per se but how it was conducted. Spain, as a backward country, soaked in religious fanaticism and economically retarded, was unfit for this purpose. Instead, it was necessary to civilise the Indians, to bring them from their primitive state to that of a ‘policed’ people through enlightened education and good government. Through their reformulation of the history of the New World, this current of enlightenment thought provided Napoleonic imperialists with a discourse and the ideological foundations for reforming their meridional subjects. If Raynal and Diderot rewrote the history of the conquest to shift the crime of the Spanish from one of imperial expansion to that of subsequent ethnocide, Voltaire formulated most clearly the methodology and ultimate goals of the civilising mission. In his Essai sur

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les moeurs, and with a supreme irony, Voltaire pointed to the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, as the template for enlightened colonial rule. In contrast to the Quakers in British America, who sought only to civilise the Indians by example, the Jesuits put them firmly under their control, and then actively educated them: In all truth, the Jesuits made use of religion to deprive these peoples of their liberty: but they policed them, they made them industrious, and in the end, (they) came to govern that vast country as a European monastery.91 Savages could be civilised, because the Jesuits had done it. Voltaire, thus, set himself against the determinism of Montesquieu, in general, and that of De Pauw, in particular, who had argued that savage peoples were destined to disappear once ‘policed’ peoples settled among them. On the contrary, Voltaire and Raynal argued that a civilising mission could overcome any geographic or climatic obstacle. Buffon set this in a historicist context: the state of nature, of savagery, was transitory; all such societies were destined to emerge from it, and it was the role of ‘policed’ societies to help them out of it. The discourse was thus prepared for the Napoleonic imperialists, and they would deploy it. ‘Civilisation’ was not just invoked by Voltaire, Raynal and the others, its meaning was increasingly defined: a civilised society was a ‘policed’ society; it obeyed laws, it possessed, and depended on, efficient rational government; it was productive and, essentially, urban. Above all, it was feasible, anywhere. The philosophes soon turned their attentions to Europe, for they did not see the continent as wholly civilised according to their own lights. Diderot and Voltaire, especially, were drawn to Russia, through the determined reforms of Peter the Great, and then to those of Catherine the Great, as examples of the ‘civilising mission’ in action. Voltaire devoted a biography to Peter; both men corresponded copiously with Catherine, their contemporary, and in all this, they gave the Napoleonic imperialists of a later generation a refinement of their apologist support for colonialism in the New World; they brought it into a European context. Diderot advised and encouraged Catherine in her legal reforms, thus placing the need for codified law at the centre of any enlightened, reforming project, although his advice remained theoretical to the point

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of opacity. Indeed, he soon despaired of Catherine’s methods, believing that she was intractably wedded to despotism, and would never allow law to become the cornerstone of a reformed Russia.92 Voltaire had no such qualms about the fundamental relationship between authoritarian rule and the enlightened, civilising mission, however. This found its most emphatic expression in his Le Sie`cle de Louis XIV and his Histoire de l’Empire Russe sous Pierre le Grand, written concurrently, in the 1730s. These two works, taken together, form almost the ideological tap root of the practice and justification for Napoleonic imperialism. He drew on the distinction Machiavelli made between the ‘natural prince’ and the ‘new prince’, but developed them in very different ways. Machiavelli is very clear at the beginning of The Prince that a ‘natural prince’ is a hereditary ruler of a wellestablished state. In Books VI and VII he details the problems facing ‘new’ princes, and defines them as ‘new’ because they have either acquired power by means other than hereditary succession, or have conquered new territory. However, Voltaire recast these twin concepts of the ‘natural prince’ in new ways for his own times. For Voltaire, ‘hereditary’ was conceived not in dynastic terms but in those of cultural and political heritage; a ‘natural prince’ had inherited the intellectual and cultural foundations of a civilisation. By contrast, he defined a ‘new prince’ as a ruler who inherited an uncivilised society, and derived his ‘newness’ from his desire to civilise it. Voltaire’s reinterpretation of Machiavelli emerges in clear geographic, as well as cultural terms, in his lives of Louis and Peter: Peter was the paradigm of the ‘new prince’, who existed on the periphery of Europe (and of China, Voltaire’s other pole of civilisation); he had a blank canvas to work upon, and his remit was to advance enlightened civilisation into new territories, to bring it to the uncivilised. That is, his work was that of the Jesuits, but in the Old World, not the New. Louis XIV was, by contrast, the ‘natural prince’. He may have inherited a kingdom in thrall of religious fanaticism – to superstition – and a nobility still prone to the barbarous ways of their Frankish ancestors, but France had a history of Latin civilisation, with its layers of cultural resources, to draw upon. He described Peter the Great thus: ‘. . . he everywhere forced nature, in his subjects, in himself . . . but he forced her only to render her more pleasing and noble,’93 whereas the ‘revolution’ worked under Louis XIV was a collective achievement:

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The life of Lewis XIV is not the only object of this work: its design is greater and more extensive. We would endeavour to describe to posterity, not the actions of only one man, but the genius of the age.94 The ‘natural prince’ did not stand alone, however absolutist he was in theory. He was part of the collective heritage of a deep-rooted civilisation. The ‘new prince’ was alone. Napoleon may emerge as a ‘new prince’ in France, according to Machiavelli, on the level of l’histoire e´ve´nementielle,95 but at a deeper level, in Voltaire’s formulation, he was, indeed, an ‘hereditary prince’, the heir to French civilisation, all the more so because the regime strove so overtly to reconcile le grand sie`cle to the immediate heritage of the Revolution. In his conquered territories, Napoleon embodied both the Machiavellian and the Voltairian concepts of ‘the new prince’: unlike Peter, he was a newcomer, a usurping conqueror, but like him, Napoleon was the bearer, the enforcer, of a civilising mission, and nowhere more so, than in his Mediterranean conquests. If his civilising mission was to succeed, Napoleon had to advance civilisation into Nuestras Indı´as, where the Jesuit ‘wave’ had failed before him, while in the centres of the ancien re´gime states, his challenge was to regenerate and reform elite cultures which are recognisable as ‘trivialised’ in Said’s formulation. In both roles, as a Machiavellian and Voltairian ‘new prince’, Napoleon had the heritage of Louis XIV to carry with him. Voltaire’s concept of the ‘new prince’ offered hope to the men charged with sending yet another ‘wave of civilisation’ against the southern mountains, while his reinventing of the ‘natural prince’, as part of a cultural continuum, saved the legacy of history for the new regime: in a purely French context, this allowed the new regime, first, to set aside ‘original pessimism about the history of France’ which explained so much of the ‘precocious radicalism of the French Revolution,’ in the words of Mona Ozouf,96 and then to absorb significant elements of the old, in ways the ideology of the Revolution rejected. In the wider context of its European empire, it salvaged the legacy of Rome for the French. Voltaire was at one with Montesquieu over the wholly retrograde influence of the Catholic Reformation on the Mediterranean, but he did not reject Roman civilisation, as, ultimately, did Montesquieu. ‘Empire’, itself, now had both an optimistic purpose and a fine European pedigree.

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Voltaire offered far more than this to Napoleonic imperialism, by way of encouragement. The common theme of his lives of Peter and Louis is the ‘royal thesis’, itself an angry riposte to his contemporaries about the fundamental incompatibility of authoritarian monarchy and enlightenment. For Voltaire, it was the only sure motor of change. From his faith in authoritarian monarchy stemmed much else. He defined the meaning of a socie´te´ police´e in real, precise terms which suited the Napoleonic regime well: it all rested on a strong ruler, surrounded by a refined intelligentsia, a neo-classical court. This was the foundation of the rule of law, with a state capable of enforcing it, but ‘police’ also embraced public works, the promotion of high culture, and the ubiquitous if intangible concept of moeurs.97 Le Sie`cle de Louis XIV and Histoire de l’Empire Russe sous Pierre le Grand, taken together or separately, offered a later generation charged with a ‘civilising mission’, a history of enlightenment itself which well suited their purposes: it began under, and because of, a strong ruler. The Napoleonic regime always acknowledged its debt to what Voltaire called for future generations le grand sie`cle and one of the consistent aspirations of the regime created at Brumaire was to reconcile this heritage with that of the Revolution. This was not very difficult for its adherents in an imperial, as opposed to a specifically French context. The imperial servants of the Napoleonic regime never forgot Montesquieu’s dictums. The determinism of climate and geography always haunted them and, when the variations of local topography were taken into consideration, this could breed optimism, in equal measure to despair. The highland peripheries were somehow seen as ‘above the Sirocco’, as it were; their inhabitants, whether in Italy, Iberia or the Balkans, were ‘saveable’ by their very isolation from the previous ‘waves’ of essentially corrupting civilisation – in this case, the enfeebling obscurantism of the Catholic Reformation which had so infested the cities and plains, which actually posed the greater existential problem for the establishment of French moeurs, even if the peripheries were, and remained, the more tangible threat to basic law and order. Their ultimate adherence was to Voltaire, and so armed, they set to their task. The common assumption of Montesquieu and Voltaire was that Europe did indeed contain Nuestras Indı´as, regions and peoples which were at lower levels of civilisation than that of France. Voltaire’s ‘north’ did not fall under Napoleonic hegemony, but a large swathe of

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Montesquieu’s ‘south’ did, and the French assumed the reins of its government with minds deeply influenced by both men. The power of such influences on a generation of imperial rulers cannot but make the work of Edward Said pertinent to its study. In some of the chapters which follow, it may have been mistaken to appear to entertain direct comparisons between Said’s chosen histoire e´ve´nementielle and that of Napoleonic Europe. It is beyond my competence to judge if his views are correct in the context he derived them from. Nevertheless, the intellectual and cultural influences with which French imperial officials were impregnated in the early nineteenth century makes Said’s concept of ‘the other’ difficult to ignore, even if it is essential to modify them. (Climatic and geographic determinism left scant scope to engender the racism of both earlier and later European colonial empires, to cite but the most obvious divergence from Said’s concept of cultural imperialism.) The most powerful rebuttal of the application of the Saidian concept of cultural imperialism to the Napoleonic empire was made by Geoffrey Ellis, in reply to Stuart Woolf, on the grounds that Napoleonic rule, unlike that of later colonial empires, was of too brief a duration to allow such relationships to develop.98 This is contestable when it is remembered how firmly entrenched French prejudices were towards the Mediterranean at the point of conquest, and how enhanced their own sense of superiority was among the French, by their sense of selfliberation during the Revolution and of having mastered it enough, and distilled it under the Consulate, to survive and conquer. All this made the experience of imperial rule preordained and intense: this was a very different ‘other’ from that of the non-European world, for the ‘meridionals’ were peoples the French felt they knew well, but still looked down on. Indeed, their own recent history had sharpened their sense of mission, and the innate cultural confidence which went with it.

Cicero, the law and l’homme re´ge´ne´re´: The French mission to Europe Mona Ozouf made a seminal point when she said that, ‘(with) the idea of the “new man”, one reaches the central dream of the Revolution . . . A dream, but not only a dream. A thousand institutions and creations converge on it.’99 The Napoleonic regimes never abandoned this dream. Rather, they developed it, and pointed it away from a ‘regenerated’

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France towards the rest of its hegemony. No region felt its force more than its Mediterranean possessions. The ways in which that dream were to be realised became dirigiste under the Napoleonic regimes, perhaps representing less the imposition of a different set of Napoleonic ideas on the concept of regeneration than the triumph of one of the two currents of revolutionary thought on the matter, as discerned by Ozouf, that of need for authoritarian direction: ‘. . . the new man . . . must (be made) by difficult work. It was to be a titanic project,’; ‘a meticulous, dirigiste (regeneration) . . . a sequential regeneration which moved from laws to moeurs’. It could not have been otherwise, given that the project of regeneration had met with determined opposition, and that the unregenerated existed side-by-side with the ‘new man’.100 This could hardly have been otherwise, given French perceptions of the Mediterranean in the first decades of the nineteenth century.101 The ‘regenerated generation’ of Napoleonic imperialists were there to set an example and direct the Mediterranean, but it went further. In the conditions of the ‘degenerate’ urban and lowland Mediterranean, and the savagery of its mountainous peripheries, conscription became the immediate instrument of regeneration for the French; it was the Napoleonic regime’s way of ‘forcing men to be free’; it was the school of the empire, as well as of the nation. This was how Rousseau survived and prospered under Napoleon. The French, like most imperial overlords, worked on the premise that their rule would endure; they carried out reforms that signified they had come to stay, and so their mission was meant to leave an indelible, transforming mark. Rational civil administration was the foundation of this, but its workings did not embrace the private sphere, that of moeurs, closely enough. Conscription might rekindle masculine – not merely martial – values, but it could only set an example to those it did not touch directly, and even in a period of unprecedentedly huge levies, it was not a regenerating agent capable of reaching a whole society on a permanent basis, in every facet of life. French officials, even as their daily burdens were dominated by conscription, still predicated their reforms on the assumption that the wars would end. French power and authority rested firmly on the shoulders of the gendarmerie, a unique institution throughout the Napoleonic Mediterranean, which gave the imperial regime an unprecedented reach into the peripheries. Without it, any and all Napoleonic legislation, reforming and regenerative or otherwise,

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would have met the same impotent fate as those of the anciens regimes. The gendarmerie was a genuinely revolutionary arrival in the mountains and elsewhere, but it was conceived of as a means to the end of regeneration.102 From the very outset of their domination, the French – and many Italians and Spaniards – conceived of the law as the most durable, omnipresent and all-pervading agency of ensuring the dissemination and permanence of regeneration. Ozouf made the link between regeneration and the law with admirable clarity, in her study of the evolution of the term in the 1790s; for the revolutionaries, ‘moeurs, once regenerated during and by the Revolution, will be followed by good laws, to law, good laws are the consequence of good moeurs’.103 Their faith in the value of the law came directly from their own ‘legal regeneration’, embodied finally in the Code Napoleon and its subsequent satellite codes. However, the Code itself was preceded by the creation of a new court system, well before 1804. These twin pillars of French justice were both a weapon and the goal of Napoleonic reform. Regeneration now had a firm institutional pivot, the Code and the system which administered it. Turning this into reality was indeed a titanic task. In no other part of the Mediterranean’s many public spheres were Braudel’s ‘many voices’ more varied than in that of the law. Within the Italian states, there were often clear divides between a higher, ‘national’ law administered by a professional magistracy, the togati, and the myriad worlds of local judges and municipal statutes below them. Even after nearly a century of Bourbon attempts at centralisation, the Spanish cities and provinces retained their distinctive legal cultures. All this variation was writ even larger in what became ‘Illyria’. The French answered this cacophony with one, clear, unswerving voice of their own: their codes of law and procedure would be the only law. ‘One empire under one law’ was their policy, whether in the imperial departments or the satellite kingdoms of Italy and Spain. The new regime sought to destroy the complex world of the legal cultures of the western Mediterranean at a stroke of the pen. When that failed, they dug in for the longue dure´e, drawing on the hard lessons learnt early in the Revolution, that where regeneration did not occur spontaneously, it would have to be brought about over time. ‘Regeneration: it will be for tomorrow,’ in the words of Mona Ozouf.104 If it could not have been otherwise for the heirs of the Revolution, for their subjects, few things were more alien. It was a huge challenge, but Napoleonic hopes of regeneration depended on the

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successful implantation of French law. That the legal worlds they chose to sweep away at a stroke had given birth to the finest legal minds of the age – Tanucci and Beccaria in Italy, Jovellanos in Spain – or that Mediterranean jurisprudence was nourished in some of the finest universities in Europe – Pavia and Pisa in Italy, Simancas in Spain – and steeped in Roman law, daunted the French not at all. French hopes derived from Cicero. When Voltaire ‘saved’ the concept of empire and the reputation of Rome for enlightened reformers, he saved Cicero, and this proved crucial for the nature of Napoleonic imperialism. Cicero put the law at the centre of imperial rule, and the Napoleonic empire followed suit. Revolution spurred regeneration; the law, a product of the Revolution, would sustain it. Napoleonic imperialists embraced the Ciceronian conception that men who had the potential to be civilised always recognised that ‘a good law is a good law’ in the words of both Condorcet and his ultimate master, Cicero. Those faced with the task of regenerating the Napoleonic Mediterranean embraced Cicero’s dictum as their working template for imperialism. Voltaire provided the philosophical foundations for their mission, but Cicero gave it their most practical hope and tool for its ultimate success. In the hands of those who had to confront Montesquieu’s pessimism, the Napoleonic empire came to resemble the Roman imperium of Cicero, more than that of Trajan. Their experience of ruling substantial tracts of the western Mediterranean disgusted the French, but it made them think hard about the nature of their imperial mission, about what they wanted their empire to be, and about their image of themselves. It convinced them of the intrinsic link between empire and the civilising mission. In a word, small was not beautiful for the French. Small states were weak by nature; they could not control their peripheries, nor could they offer sufficient opportunities for their elites to break free of the pettiness of campanilismo. It was the ‘bigness’ of France that had long facilitated grandeur, and it was grandeur that liberated the elites of the centre from their cosseted localism, and the elites and masses of the peripheries from their culture of vendetta, as well as from the ignorance and superstition bred by geographical isolation. The arrival of the French Empire – an imperialism sprung from une Grande Nation – was the answer to all of this. The French came to feel that empire was natural to them; that they had evolved from la Grande Nation into le Grand Empire, by way of the

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regenerative process of the Revolution. What their tradition and their capacity for renewal had given them were the means to channel human intelligence and creativity onto a wide territorial scale: the centralised administrative system, on the one hand, and the Code on the other. In their conflict with the meridional climate and the heritage of weak government before them every day, the Napoleonic administrators hovered unhappily between Voltairian faith in the capacity of education – in its widest sense – and good government, to regenerate, sustain and spread civilised moeurs, and a Montesquiean despair that environment would triumph over all their efforts. On balance, the evidence shows that most of them stayed loyal to Voltaire, and to faith in the reforming powers of ‘the natural prince’ going forth into untamed realms. Good government and good laws were the ultimate answer, with conscription and the Concordat as midwives to a new society. It was, in the end, official policy. At this point, it is time to contemplate the obvious: the French had rejected almost all they found in meridional culture; they did not see it as in any way a part of their own collective identity, nor were any of its facets to be incorporated into the imperial identity they were forging for themselves and all of their administre´s. There is an impressive scholarly literature which might indicate that this sense of ‘otherness’ went on to define a later generation of Italian administrators and intellectuals, who transposed this French self-image onto the Mezzogiorno after unification, half a century later.105 For the French who served in Italy, their imperial experience of the western Mediterranean had given at least one group of influential Frenchmen a strong sense of self, and of their country. Their ‘France’ was a France of the north and east: urban, secular, literate, rather than visual or religious in its cultural tastes. Voltaire and, indeed, Cicero, drove the French in their working lives, for these were the intellectual influences on the ideology of Napoleonic imperialism and the imperial strategies of the regime. Nevertheless, the sensitivities of the servants of the regime, as they confronted the task before them, were never far for those of Montesquieu, for Montesquieu resolutely claimed France for ‘northern Europe’. Wilfully ignoring the existence of its own Midi, and of the powerful legacy of Rome itself Montesquieu discarded the ‘Latin’ inheritance and positioned French culture and moeurs firmly within the world of the Franks, as both the nobles and, particularly, parlementaire nobles of his era were disposed to do. The French in Italy

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and Spain readily followed him in seeing France as a ‘country of the north’, thus discounting momentarily the bitter experience of imposing the new regime upon their own Midi. In this, at least, Montesquieu proved a remarkable progenitor of a cast of mind which became prevalent in the servants of all European empires in the centuries to come: the idealisation of the Metropole. The French were men and women stranded in a world that was, if not alien, certainly distasteful, retrograde and not to be respected. They clung to a vision of ‘home’ and of themselves that proved stronger for them than anything they confronted. So armed, the French proved as resistant to ‘waves’ of revolt or subtler forms of defiance, as the southern mountain had to ‘civilisation’. It survived even military defeat and expulsion, to say nothing of the realities of what they called ‘the Interior’, all of which surfaced in the vicious ‘White Terror’ of their own Midi in 1814– 15.106 To misquote Benedict Anderson, a more imagined community there could not have been.107 This was the most immediate legacy of empire in the Napoleonic Mediterranean.

A new regime in a timeless setting Napoleonic imperialism was a very new regime in its Mediterranean provinces; its arrival heralded a genuine break with the past for the peoples of the Italian, Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. The Consular regime may have prided itself on ‘ending’ the Revolution in its French heartland, but it still claimed to have ‘saved it’. Within France, this was meant to open the way to blending the best of the achievements of the 1790s with what was finest in the French past. However, the Revolution had also been saved for export to its imperial territories, and it was here that dirigiste radicalism lived on, and became the driving force of a civilising mission to societies long felt by the French to be inferior to their own. There was nothing new in this for the peoples of the Mediterranean, particularly those of its mountains: the Jesuits – the gendarmerie of the Catholic Reformation – had washed upon them in a similar frame of mind. The French were different from previous ‘waves’ for two reasons, however. The first was, simply, the practical power they were able to wield in the pursuit of their civilising mission: they entered their new dominions from an unprecedented position of strength, sallying forth

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from the most populous unitary state in Europe, its ‘China’, as France was known to contemporaries. Its populace yielded up unprecedented numbers of its sons for the new armies of the new regime and so, sufficient numbers of veterans to create the gendarmerie and ensure that four members of its six-man brigades were always, invariably, French: if the Republic had not reached the village, ideologically, the empire did so, militarily. France also possessed a relatively large pool of literate, educated men to staff an imperial bureaucracy and magistracy down to the level of the department, at least, and well-educated, intelligent women to support them. All this was brought to bear on the Italian peninsula, and was making its presence felt in the Balkans in the last years of the empire. It failed in Spain, but even there, the French were finding qualified success in the years 1810 –12, when they were at peace elsewhere. Everyone knew what the new regime wanted, and what it was like, even as they sometimes managed to fend it off, as in much of Spain. The Lombards and Piedmontese embraced many of its essentials, if often on terms the French did not like or grasp. This new regime was powerful and unbending, and it left a profound mark on its Mediterranean hegemony, both positive and negative. The French generated admiration for their determination to modernise the public sphere, if not quite in equal measure to the rage and resentment they triggered, through an aggressive advance on hitherto little-governed societies. The second source of the utter newness of this new regime was in the minds of the French themselves. However ossified, or even betrayed, the ideals of the 1790s may have become within Napoleonic France, they found a new lease of life in its Mediterranean possessions, precisely because it was here that the French of the new regime confronted their old enemies in what they interpreted as unreconstructed form: decadent nobles who manipulated a craven dependency culture in the cities with the connivance of their fellow nobles in the higher echelons in the Church: a degenerate, ubiquitous Church which fostered superstition and obscurantism at all levels of society, still rich and privileged in the ill-informed minds of Napoleonic officials, and estranged from the primitive purity they felt their own Concordat had returned it to. And then there was the mountain. ‘Regeneration’ was, itself, reborn in the face of the jagged, forbidding peaks. A new battle, fought by a regime more powerful than any hitherto seen, took the field in one of the oldest arenas of cultural warfare in Europe. It was not just

INTRODUCTION

43

their power that made the French different, but their belief that they had no precursors. The French of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic generation saw themselves as unique, not just from their experience of the 1790s or European conquest, but because they alone had regenerated themselves into a new people. They had come to acknowledge the debts to their own past, and to that of Rome, but they acknowledged no past masters. The French past was a point of reference and a foundation, an umbilical cord that had been cut and no longer bound them, however influential it might be. The influence of antiquity was now ‘less that of history, than of utopia’,108 and a lost utopia, at that. This cast of mind made them arrogant, driven, often inspired and intellectually self reliant: they were on their own in Braudel’s complex world, and they believed in themselves. They were perfect imperialists, in a setting ill-disposed to empire.

PART I THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

1 THE PAROCHIAL REVOLUTION: 1799 AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION IN ITALY

A

tidal wave of anti-French, anti-revolutionary revolts swept the Italian peninsula in the spring and summer of 1799. From Calabria and Puglia in the south to the Alpine valleys, and from the latifundi of the lowland swamps of the pianura padana to the desolate pasture lands of the Apennines, the French occupiers and their ideological sympathisers, the ‘Italian Jacobins’, found themselves assailed with an often hideous ferocity by the coalition of the social forces unimaginable only a few years before. The first of many paradoxes of the revolts of 1799 was the coming together of so many previously antagonistic forces against the French; lord and peasant, bourgeois and noble, central and local administrations, all found a place in a social configuration that was as varied as its geographical settings, in opposition to the new forces unleashed by the French Revolution. The extent and intensity of the anti-French risings of 1799 made a powerful impact on contemporaries, and they deserve to be set beside those other beacons of ‘the counter-revolution in action’, the Vende´e, the Tyrol and the Spanish War of Independence, not only for their scale but for what they represent ideologically. The diversity and apparent contradictions of the popular risings of 1799 are underlain by an emphatic rejection of the ideology of the French Revolution and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, by a wide spectrum of Italian society.

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The second Italian campaign of 1800 quickly reversed the political and military circumstances brought about in 1799, at least in northern and central Italy, making it all too tempting to relegate the popular risings to the status of an ephemeral eruption of archaic social forces, allowed a brief moment in the Mediterranean sun by a transient set of military coincidences. Viewed in this way, the counter-revolutions of 1799 can be set easily to one side and attention focused on the experience of state-building and political experimentation which took place under the French in Italy in the period 1800– 14. Such an approach quite logically leads to the history of Italy in this period – I’epoca francese – being written with the Italian Jacobins and the dynamic aspects of French rule at its centre. Indeed, a long tradition of historiography has evolved along precisely these lines both inside and outside Italy.1 Fixed within the limits of the Revolutionary Napoleonic period and approached, for the most part, through the political and administrative institutions created by the giacobini italiani, the Italian experience of French rule appears as a largely positive one. It puts at its centre the emergence of protonational institutions in the Kingdom of Italy and the initiation of a coherent debate on the nature and desirability of unification;2 thus interpreted, l’epoca fru´ncese becomes both the triumph of eighteenth-century enlightened reform and the fountain-head of the Risorgimento. It becomes a ‘usable’, indeed an essential, component in the evolution of Italian nationalism. Notwithstanding the formidable corpus of scholarship this historiographical approach has produced, it is a mistaken, narrow and deeply flawed interpretation of the character of the period. From the wider and longer perspective of ‘the long nineteenth century’ – which in Italy stretches as far forward as 1922, if not beyond – it is the revolts of 1799 that assume a seminal importance rather than the Jacobin triennio which preceded them, or even the 14 years of Franco-Jacobin rule that followed. To push back into ‘the long nineteenth century’, the most striking feature of the last quarter of the eighteenth century in Italy is the resounding, often violent rejection of enlightened reform in many parts of the peninsula. Its ideological rejection is probably clearest in the opposition of the Lombard notabilii to Joseph II’s projects for administrative centralisation in 1784– 9,3 while its popular, more archaic elements are exemplified by the Viva Maria risings of the 1790s in Tuscany. To bring the period forward beyond 1814 is to undermine

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still further the centrality of Vitalia giacobina and replace it by counterrevolution. The struggle for unification was an uphill one, of this there can be no doubt, and the truth that more Italians died fighting against the Risorgimento than for it should be treated as food for thought, rather than as a stale, unpalatable fact. The experiences of the post-unification state were equally painful, and the search for its true legitimation still continues. Thus, the constitution and the power of counter-revolution are foreshadowed in the events of the last year of the eighteenth century and forewarn in turn the struggles of the nineteenth. At the most functional level of history, the revolts of 1799 are easily swept aside. When compared, on this level, with the Vende´e or the Spanish War of Independence, their lives are counted in months rather than in years. When set beside the achievements of the Italian Jacobins, the superficial, if factual result, in the short term, was that pro-French rule was re-established for half a generation; while in the longer term, however imposing the forces of counter-revolution may have been, Italy was eventually unified. At no time, however, did the inspiration and control of either Vitalia giacobina or the Risorgimento amount to anything other than the preserve of a small, if well-organised and determined, minority. The French Revolution in Italy was indubitably the work of a sect, corresponding in its composition and ideology to that sketched out by Augustin Cochin.4 It is arguable that his concept of ‘une re´volution sectaire’ is far more accurate in an Italian context than in a French one. Here, then, lies the case for dethroning the giacobini italiani from the central position they have sometimes been given in the history of Italy in the age of the French Revolution. However, the argument for substituting them by the counter-revolutionary risings of 1799 cannot rest solely on their place in a succession of similar revolts dotted throughout the period c.1780 – 1922. This case must turn on their juxtaposition to the most coherent drive for reform and change the Italian peninsula had seen so far: the ideology of the French Revolution. The very nature of the challenge confronting the rebels of 1799 makes it more significant, and potentially more formative, than the preceding revolts of the ancien re´gime. This stems less from the introduction of new xenophobic elements afforded by the presence of French troops, than from the overt opposition the rebels manifested to the native Italian regimes of the triennio. The manner and motives

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for the rejection of so formidable a set of political principles is, in itself, a momentous historical event. ***** It is not by chance or pedantic affectation that the revolts of 1799 have been referred to consistently throughout this chapter in the plural, for their diversity is their very essence, just as their multiplicity denotes their lasting significance. To portray the revolts of 1799 as the unification of the Italian masses around a protonational, reactionary cause – as was the wont of neo-fascist historians5 – would be as mistaken as to insist on the economic aspects as their sole driving force. The risings of 1799 were, above all else, the defensive expressions of localism and of the deeply ingrained, indeed of the natural, elements of Hesperian society, against a series of alien, external intrusions. This is not at all to say that the revolts did not embrace internal divisions within communities, for within them powerful local rivalries were to be found. Indeed, it is undeniable that the events of 1799 nurtured and fostered these rivalries, raising them to new levels of ferocity and vindictiveness; to deny this would be folly. Rather, what is important to remember as regards these local civil wars is that a new, critical factor had entered into them. This new element was the external intervention of the revolutionary state, personified by the native giacobini and bolstered by French arms. A significant minority of the propertied classes sided with this external force, but by so doing, for whatever local or personal reasons, it consciously took sides against the essence of localism, of corporatism, and with the new, unitary concept of the state propounded by the Revolution. The ideological clarity of the native, patriot governments, with their determined though far from slavish commitment to the models of revolutionary France, made adherence to them a very different form of collaboration compared to supporting either the Austro-Russian armies or the indigenous dynasties, which carried no such ideological baggage with them. All those Italian states where groups of enlightened, Josephine reformers had directed governments towards policies of centralisation had witnessed systematic reactions by the mid 1790s. The policies of Gianni and Peter Leopold were reversed with some thoroughness by Ferdinand III in the period 1790– 9,6 while the ideological volte-face of

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the Neapolitan Bourbons was even more spectacular in the decade following the outbreak of the French Revolution.7 In both these states the reform parties and their officials and supporters in the provinces found themselves cast suddenly into opposition and adversity. The intensity of popular opposition to their economic and ecclesiastical reforms had long been clear to them, but now they also faced abandonment by the central authorities who had long been their patrons and, more to the point, their protectors. Isolated, exposed and finally, their descendants would claim, forsaken, the riformatori settecenteschi turned to the French invaders for practical protection and ideological empathy,8 a process replicated ten years later in Spain.9 In this, something of a dual paradox, a mirror image of reversed loyalties took place over much of Hesperia in the course of the 1790s. The new policy of reaction – or its intensification in the ‘unenlightened’ regimes of the Holy See and the House of Savoy – found its logical response in the provinces. The traditionalist clergy, the peasantry, sections of the aristocracy, but above all provinces and communities with traditions of autonomy – in short, those elements in society hitherto harassed by the central power for their recalcitrance – returned to an allegiance to the crown based on traditional forms of loyalty. Conversely, the reformers embraced the Revolution. This was the process that, by 1799, led to reformist bishops such as Serrao in Calabria10 or the cultivated Dominicans of Molfetta11 becoming partisans of the Revolution, and former bandit chiefs with prices on their heads becoming loyal, trusted royalist commanders.12 The logic of these shifts of loyalties was given its chronological development by the sudden volte-face in government policy in the 1790s, but the nature of the divisions themselves had longer, more profound and very tangled histories. From the mesh of local hatreds and rivalries, two very different views of the nature of the state, religion and of society itself were in the process of emerging. At the centre of this struggle lay local particularism. It was at once the area of conflict and the issue at stake, a tangled overlap of espace and mentalite´. Those who rose against the new republican regimes of the triennio did so within a context that took only its own, immediate horizons for its political world. Historians who stress the common features of this myriad of local revolts over their almost atomistic individuality shed great light on the nature of ancien re´gime cultural patterns13 but in so

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doing they risk occluding its most elemental characteristic, the defence of local particularism. There can be little doubt that vendetta, that most localised and personalised of considerations, usually dominated their actions.14 Once vendetta was transformed into a political weapon by the revolutionary conflagration, it became deeply affected by ideological divisions, even if its aims, protagonists and essential character did not change. Perhaps the most important general point to be made about il giacobinismo is that those factions who sided with the French and the native republican governments were almost everywhere the weaker in their local contexts. The nature of their relative weakness is explicit: the future giacobini were almost invariably that part of the local elite most estranged from the popular classes. In parts of the Mezzogiorno this could mean the feudal baron or even the regular clergy, noted for their rapaciousness as landlords as much as for their advanced ideas, just as easily as the rural capitalist galant’uomini. Everywhere it meant those neo-Jansenist clerics and reforming officials who had been the spearhead of the enlightened ministries of the 1780s, and those elements of the propertied classes, noble and non-noble, who had profited from the physiocratic economic policies of the reformers. In all of this, it is important to stress that the true wells of revolutionary republicanism were in the small provincial towns. Fear of disorder and popular violence was not peculiar to the republicans but it was decidedly more marked within their ranks than among the partisans of the older order.15 The Republic, then, became the preserve of the most isolated and unpopular section of the propertied classes. This not only reinforces the popular nature of the counter-revolution and the elitist character of the Revolution in Italy, it also helps resolve the seeming inconsistencies within il giacobinismo itself. This is the case whether the republicans were bourgeois notables locked in combat with a feudal baronage, as in parts of Calabria and the Basilicata16 or, in some cases, the exact reverse.17 This apparent incongruity becomes more explicable with the realisation that whoever was weaker tended to turn to the French and the new republican regimes for support, and above all for protection. Seen from this perspective, the pervasive and very important preoccupation of the Italian elites with law and order in the nineteenth century18 began with the fears of one particularly isolated and detested section of the ancien re´gime elite.

THE PAROCHIAL REVOLUTION

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With the reality or, more typically, with the prospect of determined support from the new, seemingly unstoppable forces of revolution, the local tables could be turned; the price to be paid was acceptance of, and submission to, the new revolutionary state. Perhaps the fact that the pro-republican factions in the provinces were prepared to admit ‘outsiders’ and their new ideology is as important as their original motives for doing so; indeed, it is fundamental for an understanding of counter-revolution. It is at this point that the local quarrels were transformed from apolitical family feuds and class conflicts into confrontations between a political culture based on the Revolution and one based on particularism. The centrality of particularism is reinforced still further by the geographical pattern of the counter-revolutionary revolts. At the risk of apparent contradiction, it is possible to discern such a pattern on a wide scale although this ought not to confound the rebels’ conscious motives with their coincidental manifestation. Quite simply, counterrevolution was most vibrant in environments where traditions of local independence were strongest, that is in foothill areas and where municipal rivalries were particularly fierce. In an urban context, it was not the regional capital of Bologna which became the centre of counterrevolution, but its bitter rivals Ferrara and Lugo, who saw themselves as potential victims of centralisation.19 The rural model also depends on the relative autonomy which already existed before the revolutionary crisis. A clear example is the Piedmontese province of Mondovi, a region noted for its resentment of authority under the ancien re´gime, but which then became a bastion of counter-revolution in 1799.20 In these cases, and in many others, notably the Neapolitan provinces of the Abruzzi,21 the initial paradox of how long-standing recalcitrance to ancien re´gime authority was suddenly transformed into ferocious loyalty is best explained by an insistence on the particularist element in the revolts and the willingness of the giacobini to be governed by central authority. At this point, then, the whole of the ancien re´gime – even its hitherto repressive, centralist elements – becomes associated with a political culture based on particularism. The king is no longer the agent of enlightened centralisation in Naples or Piedmont, but the guarantor of local liberties.22 This insistence on particularism is equally valid in the case of the great urban counter-revolution of 1799, that of the Neapolitan lazzaroni. Although nominally at the centre of the state,

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there is much in their actions to suggest they saw the state as their local preserve and the capital itself as a local entity rather than a centre of national power. The economic nature of their grievances, centred on commodity prices,23 found in its expression ‘an intimate sense of injustice, however confused it may have been’,24 which arose from unprecedented practices on the grain market.25 Perhaps a more direct acknowledgement of the strength of local particularism among the lazzaroni came from the beleaguered republican government of Naples. At the height of the revolt, it appeared to the Eletti, the traditional municipal magistrates, as the only authority other than the king, that the lazzaroni would obey. ‘We carry no weight with the popular masses, they will respond to the Eletti and the giacobini went on to ask these magistrates to save them’.26 Their appeal was ignored, but it is interesting that they felt the Eletti had more influence in a crisis than the viceroy appointed by the king. No one was more aware of the importance of local particularism and the need to respect it than Cardinal Ruffo. He was the most successful leader and organiser produced by the 1799 revolts; his sanfediste forces stand out as a determined and relatively successful attempt to challenge the French and the patriots at a national level. This makes his remarks to Lord Acton, written before his expedition began, all the more significant: In as much as those areas now armed in the cause of God pay very few taxes and that the people consider only what is immediate, such a state of independence appears to be the most suitable and durable.27 In the present context the most telling point about Ruffo’s expedition is that his actions did not actually incite counter-revolutionary revolts in the Mezzogiorno, nor did they have to. Ruffo found the local conflicts awaiting him, and his main task was to co-ordinate them.28 Throughout the Mezzogiorno, in the cities of the Marches and Legations, and in the uplands of Tuscany, Liguria and Piedmont, the revolts were marked by their spontaneity, itself a product of their atomised particularism. Communities of this kind retained the necessary cohesion to resist the intrusion of the Revolution exactly because of their independence from central government. When its structures collapsed and its officials fled,

THE PAROCHIAL REVOLUTION

55

there were sources, both personal and institutional, which the popular classes could turn to for leadership. If the counter-revolution had a powerful popular base upon which to build, it also cut across socioeconomic barriers to an extent seldom achieved by the republicans.29 The coalitions that emerged did so only at the most local level, but when and where they did, they became sources of powerful, concerted resistance, and attention must be given to their internal dynamics. ***** The crucial relationship of spontaneity to parochialism, and their collective influence on the structures of leadership within the revolts, is perhaps best illustrated by examining the events of 1799 in that part of Hesperia where local loyalties and traditional social and economic relationships no longer existed. In the lowlands of the Po valley a landless, increasingly mobile and proletarianised peasantry had emerged as the salient social product of the spread of the cultivation of rice and maize during the eighteenth century.30 When the counter-revolution came to this area it found itself in very different terrain from the uplands and the cities. A great deal of campaigning had taken place in the plain of the Po in the period 1796– 9, as was traditional in military terms and there is much evidence to suggest that the demands and conduct of French troops in the area created seething resentment in town and country alike.31 Nonetheless, it is revealing that the only significant anti-French revolt prior to 1799 had been an urban one, in Pavia. It was only with the arrival of the allied armies in the spring of 1799 that the peasantry of this area took the field against the French and the republicans. Although the allies’ appeals to the standard leitmotif of ‘Church and King’ were received enthusiastically, it is equally true that the counter-revolution had to be imported into this area largely because no indigenous social and cultural structures existed to generate it. The latifundi of the Vercellese and Novarese, on the border between Piedmont and Lombardy, were ‘raised’ by Branda di Luciano, a minor cleric of mysterious origins in the pay of the Austrians.32 His exercise in crusading for the la santa fede makes an interesting contrast to Ruffo’s expedition through the fiercely independent, atomised communities of the Mezzogiorno. Whereas Ruffo had to integrate and appease the local elites of different, often rival universita`,33 Branda’s commanders were

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always Capuchin friars and Austrian hussars;34 the leadership was devoid of local galant’uomini. Indeed, once Branda’s Massa Christiana reached the foothill regions of the Langhe and Astigiano, it began to disintegrate35 largely because it was superfluous to these areas, which had already risen of their own volition under their own leaders.36 Branda’s Massa Cristiana was a very different beast from the sanfediste forces led by Ruffo. The core of Ruffo’s forces, those who stayed with him throughout his march, were largely bandit chiefs like Fra Diavolo and disbanded conscripts37 and he often had great trouble in trying to get local forces to operate outside their own areas.38 Branda was able to keep his horde of landless braccianti with him until the whole raison d’eˆtre of the Massa evaporated when it had helped to retake the lowlands, a task the Piedmontese montagnardi, like their Tuscan and southern counterparts, were able to perform for themselves. The anatomy of the counter-revolutions of the uplands presents a very different picture, one whose strengths and weaknesses – indeed, whose very identity – turn on their parochial, wholly indigenous character. The Piedmontese foothills produced a plethora of capable and influential local leaders, such as the Ciravenga family in Narzole,39 a community with a long tradition of resistance to authority.40 This family of local notables – an ex-army officer, a priest and the steward of the local signore – organised a very serious local revolt against the French and the rival town of Cherasco, which was dominated by a patriot faction.41 Mondovi, only a few miles away, produced an equally ferocious and successful revolt led by men of similar social and economic rank, but they never attempted to come to each other’s aid.42 Even without each other’s help, these local forces ejected the Army of Italy and the giacobini unaided by regular troops or the Massa Cristiana, but it was anathema to them to do more than liberate their own paese. A similar pattern is reproduced in other parts of Italy where local autonomy and traditional social structures prevailed, and these were not always or necessarily upland regions. The coastal towns of Puglia spawned counter-revolutions of tremendous intensity. In Molfetta the reaction against the proclamation of the Republic was a spontaneous outburst by the urban popular classes – largely artisans and fishermen – from which a governo popolare emerged under two fishermen, Felice Ragno and Maurangelo De Gioia.43 When Molfetta sent a delegation to Ruffo it consisted of three notabilii and three men drawn from i plebi,44 itself an

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indication of the nature of the support for the counter-revolution here. In the neighbouring town of Trani, the assault on the republicans, themselves dominated by the richest local families, was led by two local magnates at the head of ‘people of the lower classes’, again mainly fishermen and some peasants.45 The clergy was equally prominent in the Puglian revolts, as they were almost everywhere, but of particular interest in this region is the alignment of the wealthy, contemplative orders with the republicans and the lower secular clergy with the counterrevolution.46 In all these examples, whether they are drawn from the Puglian coast or the Piedmontese uplands, an important prerequisite for the emergence of resistance to the new order was the survival of an indigenous elite, unshaken by changes at the centre of the state, a circumstance less likely to occur under a powerful truly centralised re´gime. When this presence was integrated quickly with spontaneous popular resistance, the results could be striking, at least within local parameters. The frontier region of the Abruzzi, Neapolitan territory on the border with the Papal States, epitomises this. Even before the royal government had appealed to them, the populace convoked their municipal assemblies – parlamenti – and elected capi to lead their local militias. Their choices were varied and significant; in Aquila, it was a young peasant, in Cicolano the parish priest, and in Arischia the royal govematore who had remained in his post.47 The smuggling entrepoˆt of Introdaqua put itself under the bandit chief Pronio and his family.48 The counterrevolution was, indeed, a broad church, but it was the local notabilii who provided most of the leadership. There were few great landowners in this rugged, infertile region,49 and it was the lower ranks of the propertied classes, i benestanti, who came into their own as local leaders with the collapse of central authority in 1799. The atomistic character of counterrevolution is underlined by the fact that there were 42 masse under separate leaders in the Neapolitan province of Aquila alone in 1799; the importance of the leadership of the local elite is revealed by the presence of 34 ‘dons’ – the title of the propertied if not the rich – among them.50 The masse found it extremely difficult to co-ordinate their operations despite initial attempts to do so.51 This drawback notwithstanding, the Abruzzi became one of the most renowned centres of resistance to French rule in Italy.52 Border country also produced the most famous and fanatical local revolt of all, that of Tolfa on the papal side of the frontier with Tuscany.

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This remote mountainous area had been an administrative backwater even by the fairly lax standards of the papal government, a community where taxation was negligible and the presence of the state ephemeral.53 The financial demands of the new Roman Republic, enforced by French troops, transformed this hitherto peaceful region – with no strong traditions of banditry as existed in the Abruzzi, Calabria or southern Piedmont – into a battlefield where French troops were repeatedly defeated by peasant militias which were organised, inspired and led in complete isolation.54 The French had to employ a considerable number of men and an even greater degree of ruthlessness to stamp out the revolt in and around Tolfa,55 and it remained a centre of overt, if less violent, resistance to them even at the height of imperial power, 1809– 14, when the Papal States were annexed to France. In July 1811, the French authorities in Rome took mesures de rigueur against the clergy and notables of Tolfa, triggered by the refusal of all the benestanti to accept the office of maire under the French. When one of them, Bonizi, was at last made to accept, he disappeared the night before his installation.56 The directeur-ge´ne´ral de police in Rome told his superiors: on ne trouvera personne qui accepte les fonctions municipales. Elles ne peuvent eˆtre confie´es qu’a` de riches proprie´taires et ceuxci les refuseront toujours tant que des preˆtres domineront dans la commune.57 In September 1811, the three leading priests in the area were ordered to be deported to Corsica58 but like the prospective maire, they were able to elude arrest.59 The enduring solidarity of the local elite in its defiance of the revolutionary state is interesting both in its particular, local context and as an example of the wider phenomenon it represents. In the autumn of 1798 the French and the imported officials of the republican government met with little initial resistance when they first entered the area to collect taxes, despoil churches and otherwise establish the new regime.60 The very fact that the personnel and trappings of the Republic had to be imported is significant in itself, and when this is correlated with the relatively passive initial response of Tolfa to the change of regime, the intensity of the counter-revolution here becomes very striking. Unlike many other upland areas examined so far, Tolfa did not undergo a

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volte-face in its loyalties to, or perceptions of, the ancien re´gime. Ignored rather than harassed, this community was in a somewhat pristine condition when it received the interventionist and aggressive presence of the new state. Its rejection of that state was very predictable given the brutality and rapacity that accompanied its introduction, but it was a rejection, not an initial or instinctive reaction to foreign or innovative government. The durability of this rejection among the local elite, lay and clerical, is equally important. Close-knit, isolated and determined, their actions could pose the most effective affront to the introduction of the new state, long after popular resistance was out of the question. Normal authority had been restored with relative ease in Tolfa after the withdrawal of French troops in September 1799, when the old municipal council re-emerged in toto to resume its duties,61 but ten years later none of these notabilii would work with the French. The example of Tolfa is one which emphatically emphasises that the old order being defended, as late as 1811, was one based on local autonomy under the aegis of local leadership. The kind of resistance found at Tolfa during the period of imperial rule can be found throughout Hesperia; the Parisian archives abound with numerous and frequent examples of the kind of resistance that took place in Tolfa in 1811. It would far exceed the scope of this study to examine them in any detail, but the simple fact of their existence bears witness to the initiation of a long, continuous attitude of resentment towards central authority in provincial Italy. The revolts of 1799 are not only the continuation of a series of rural disorders rooted in the economic crisis of the late eighteenth century,62 or in the brutal but essentially transient ravages of French occupation. The example of Tolfa, particularly, also reveals that they were not always or necessarily local civil wars, although they could certainly be all of these things. The remaining element, the context within which the local civil wars must be set, is the persistence of a preference within a large, probably preponderant section of the local elites for a heterogeneous, essentially weak political order. This outlook on politics, perhaps a more accurate description than ‘political philosophy’, reshaped the nature of the local rivalries between republicans and partisans of the old order, changing forever the context and the significance of local feuds. The municipal factions had now acquired mutually exclusive concepts of civil society, as

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well as a fresh layer of vendettas, injustices and atrocities to heap upon the existing ones, a heavier burden to carry into the new century. The counter-revolutions were, above all else, popular movements, something on which all its historians have always agreed. That it was a mass movement, as well as a civil war within the elite is nowhere better evinced than by a benestanto of the Abruzzi writing in 1806, Angelo De Jacobis, recalling the fighting near Aquila against pro-French troops from the Cisalpine Republic in 1799: the surrounding areas, having had the news (of the invasion) seeing them marching by various routes, passed on the news by sounding the bells to their friends, ringing them until the rumour at last reached the town of Aquila and a thousand armed folk turned out from it, who forced the Cisalpine (troops) to withdraw to the Marches.63 Rooted in localism as they were, the two symbols that came to rally enthusiastic rebels, such as those of Aquila, were the crown and the cross. Thus, it would seem rational to examine the relationship of both to the parochial loyalties that informed the revolts; parochialism must be interpreted, however fundamental its own role, as one strand among several. ***** The revolutionary crisis and the French invasion posed an unprecedented challenge to the governments of ancien re´gime Italy, and they responded by appealing to the masses for support; as is evident, their appeals were answered in good measure. Yet, in so doing, the governments of the ancien re´gime changed the nature of politics at least as much as the revolutionaries, however unwillingly or unwittingly. As the struggle against the Revolution became popular, spontaneous and localised, the terms ‘Church and king’ need to be understood in the terms in which they were received more than in the terms in which they were issued. It is their popular interpretation that matters. If the premise that parochialism was the fundamental characteristic of the counter-revolutions of 1799 is accepted, then the achievements of Ruffo in rallying an army of provincials around the symbols of the crown

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and the cross appears as a genuinely momentous one. To insist on the centrality of parochialism is not to detract from other motivating forces, but to enhance their importance, if also to nuance them by insisting on placing them in a fuller context. The importance of economic motives is obvious to any serious study of counter-revolution, a fact as apparent to contemporaries as to modern scholars, if often perceived in less detached ways. De Jacobis was among them: Oh, how many objects of antiquity will have been lost because they were in the houses of the lawyers and the signori! Oh, how the people ran riot as, under the guise of fighting for the crown, they tried instead to profit from the goods of the rich, calling them Jacobins!64 Yet it is also important to remember that the poor fought their battles within an atomised economic world and their goals were often aimed at reversing physiocratic economic reforms or innovations in economic life65 which usually entailed a return to tighter, traditional local controls over economic life. The same context is an essential prerequisite for an interpretation of the symbols of Church and king. As has been stressed throughout this study, an important result of the triennio and the introduction of the French revolutionary system of government was the re-emergence of the concept of loyalty to the crown, based on its role as the protector and guarantor of local liberties and customs. It was the appeal to popular force by the crown itself that brought this largely tacit concept of allegiance to the centre of the political stage, after having so often been flouted and denied by the sovereigns themselves. Indeed, it continued to be something the dynastic rulers were unhappy with, as exemplified by the bitter experiences of the exiled Bourbon and Savoyard courts among their most independent-minded subjects in Sicily and Sardinia respectively.66 Nonetheless it was the very weakness of their states, as the term would now be understood, that allowed counter-revolutionary resistance to flourish. This derives not just from geographic factors, or even from the resilient power still exercised by local elites independently of the state but also, perhaps, from the devotion the crown inspired by its very acknowledgement of provincial or parochial autonomy as privilege. The Tyrolean revolt of 1809 offers a striking example of this, but that of

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the Piedmontese barbeta, the highly independent montagnardi of the County of Nice and the Cunesee, are equally representative of loyalty based on particularism, and they provided a stout barrier to the French.67 Yet even beyond this, evidence of dynastic loyalty can be found in many local revolts, perhaps a reminder of how well-established most of the Hesperian regimes were by the late eighteenth century,68 an aspect of counter-revolution yet to receive the treatment it deserves in an Italian context. Nonetheless, loyalty to the crown sprang in great part from its most traditional role as the guardian of tradition. It was the apex of the ancien re´gime, but not its centre. It was part of that world Alexandre Dumas encapsulated in Les Trois Mousquetaires as ‘cette e´poque de liberte´ moindre mais d’inde´pendance plus grande [this era of less liberty, but of more independence]’.69 In political terms, it was exactly this which the insurgents tried to preserve. The need to do so, the event that brought traditional liberties into sharp relief, was obviously the model of the French revolutionary state with its drive for uniformity and centralisation. This aspect of the new state’s behaviour need not be laboured, so obvious is it in the history of the period, but the challenge it met with at local level must receive equal consideration. Patriots ‘federated’ to celebrate their victories, they despatched commissari to the provinces with lists of orders; everywhere, from the Alps to Calabria, they symbolised their entry into power by the same emblem, the liberty tree. The iconography of the Revolution was as uniform as its administrative norms. There were two sure signs to contemporaries that the new order was in peril, the chopping down of a liberty tree and a religious miracle. Here, in its iconography, the estrangement of one concept of society from another becomes all too evident. Recently, religion has found a prominent and proper place among historians as a driving force within the counter-revolution70 but even here, without in any way detracting from its importance, it is necessary to interpret religious sentiment in the animistic, localised context so vividly portrayed by Owen Chadwick in its ancien re´gime context71 and so incisively studied by Judith Devlin in post-revolutionary France.72 The first religious phenomena in counter-revolutionary risings were normally associated with a local saint or madonna’s statue. As Devlin states, the saint was virtually embodied by his or her particular statue, statues that wept, bled, and took vengeance in the manner of

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independent persons.73 And as such, they belonged to their places of origin; there was not one madonna, but as many as there were local shrines to a madonna, and they were one and indivisible from those shrines to the popular mind.74 In the light of this research it seems as necessary to reinterpret the place of religion in counter-revolution as much as the place of dynastic loyalty. There is much to suggest that ‘Church and king’ had a context that was essentially parochial, and that it was this archaic interpretation of both that gave counter-revolution much of its spontaneity and strength. From all of this emerges a very deep-rooted struggle of the old order against the new; placing the emphasis on the parochial nature of counter-revolution heightens the intensity of its clash with the Revolution. In this respect the rebellions of 1799 belong inextricably to their own time, their tenacious defence of the old order precluding their incorporation into any political systems or theories that come after them and do not spring from their own matrix of beliefs and perceptions. Perhaps this goes without saying, but the counterrevolutions of the 1790s also represent the first challenge to modern political culture as well as the first of the ‘last stands’ of the old order. The revolts embody the first popular response to a modern state which claimed to be free and failed to be. They are a crossroads in modern European life. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has succinctly put it, politics has always been a minority activity, but the ancien re´gime . . . used to be a justified one. It did not pretend to be a democracy. The great difference of the modern state is that it tells you that you are responsible for what it does. That it is controlled by you.75 The counter-revolutions of 1799 represent the first general realisation of this, which turned into an impassioned attempt to return to Dumas’ age of less liberty and greater independence.

2 THE MYTH AND REALITY OF ITALIAN REGIONALISM: A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NAPOLEONIC ITALY, 1801—14

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apoleon Bonaparte was a breaker of worlds, shattering the European state system in a few swift military campaigns in the first years of the nineteenth century. He shoved regions and populations together to suit his immediate purposes, and the results of this cavalier attitude toward the map of Europe often had surprising ramifications, exposing many harsh geopolitical truths. These brusque shifts in borders revealed regional configurations hitherto obscured from view;1 the very creation of a French Empire herded different societies into closer contact than ever before. The particular conditions of this brief, convulsed period provide a remarkable laboratory for the study of political culture, imperialism, and of the place of geography within them. Although this chapter may not be devoid of direct comparative interest, it is less a study of the Napoleonic period than an attempt to use its singular conditions as a methodological springboard. Its first task is to establish the usefulness of terms and concepts drawn from historical geography in this context; it then examines the consequences of a brutally swift change of regime in a definable region where geography was already a seminal influence on political culture. Finally, it points to the fluid, evolving character of European macro-regions, too often regarded as timeless.

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History has not been the first discipline to borrow from historical geography; Anthony Giddens pointed to its usefulness in the development of social theory. Giddens saw that regionalisation is not just a question of space but also ‘the zoning of time-space for routine social practices’; regions represent ‘the structuralisation of conduct across time-space’, contexts within which social interaction takes place.2 The process of interaction between politics and physical geography in the particular context of those parts of Italy Napoleon annexed directly to France, a region subdivided into clear centres and peripheries, offers a useful arena in which to test this conceptualisation. Whereas social theorists tend to examine the place of regions in the process of human interaction in the search for social routines, this is a study in dislocation. It examines the transition of a physical region from weak to strong government, exploring the consequences of the regional relocation of authority, of the interaction of old and new ruling elites, and how two different systems of government responded to the same physical environment. Italy in the Napoleonic period offers a useful example of the meeting of a determinedly centralising, authoritarian form of imperialism with communities hitherto dominated by geography and largely immune from external control. Any regional approach is particularist.3 Not without reason are local studies decried as villains in the fragmentation of history, but this chapter tries to set itself against that trend. First, within its chosen period and area of specialisation, it seeks to bring a degree of coherence out of seemingly incompatible micro-regions. Studies of Napoleonic Italy treat the two satellite kingdoms of Naples and Italy as wholes,4 the composite nature of the latter notwithstanding.5 The political unity created in the Kingdom of Italy by Napoleon, however short-lived, is assumed to outweigh the longue dure´e of the diversity of its geography and the past and future political history of its varied territories. Incongruously, the very large area annexed to France, the de´partements re´unis (the reunited departments), as the French perversely called them officially, has never been treated as one. The Napoleonic reorganisation of Italy brought together a group of states linked by the geography of the Apennine mountain chain in the seemingly most heterogeneous parts of the peninsula. On closer examination, however, they arguably constitute a coherent region. Their internal configurations were all marked by the existence of clear central urban and lowland or coastal

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cores and highland peripheries. In the terminology of historical geography, the Apennine spine created a natural periphery for the states of Piedmont, Liguria, Parma-Piacenza, Tuscany, and in a more fragmented way – for the Papal States, just as the lowland or coastal regions adjacent to the Apennine highlands created traditional ‘nodal cores’ – political, cultural and economic foci – around the great urban centres of each state. Where political variety and formal borders may denote fragmentation on one level, a shared geography transcended a myriad of local particularisms.6 This is not to disclaim the differences among these states in their political institutions or traditions, for they were very real, and their importance is now being reasserted by historians.7 It is to argue, however, that the similarities among them outweigh the differences. The experience of direct rule from Paris revealed a common political culture shaped by their common geography. The formal, political borders of these ancien re´gime states were long established. Changes of dynasty did little to alter their territories and nothing to change the relationships between centre and periphery within each of them. The new political framework revealed the existence of comparable – if still unintegrated – political cultures across those small and middle-sized Italian states lumped almost by chance by Napoleon into the de´partements re´unis. To follow Giddens, the conditions of early modern Italy allowed the macro-region of the states of the Apennine spine to extend itself deeply in time; the Napoleonic upheaval allowed it to emerge in terms of space.8 The reconfiguration of the macro-regions of the peninsula challenges the tendency among historians to regard such regions as permanent and unchanging, almost in the way that a previous generation sought to pound heterogeneous units into the framework of nation-states. As historiography and contemporary politics enter a phase when regional identity vies with nationalism, or to identify regions as the true nations, there is a danger of replacing one limiting concept with another. A wider purpose in what follows is to force European historians, in particular, to accept the possibility that there are not just regions hidden within nations but that such regions can change over time to the point where they disappear or mutate beyond useful recognition. The shifting character of regions has not been the basis of many classic analyses of modern Italy, however. The Marxist thinker Antonio

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Gramsci crystallised the centrality of a north– south fracture for every aspect of modern Italian history during the Fascist period. Gramsci saw the durability of these regional divisions extended and further entrenched by the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation in his own times, to the point that ‘north and south’ had become almost synonymous with ‘urban and rural’. His territorial definitions have become almost axiomatic, but a new current of Italian historiography, ‘the new southern history,’ has done much to destroy the vision of the south as a monolith.9 This chapter attempts to do the same for northern Italy, to shatter the concept of a ‘northern bloc’, defined not on its own terms but as a counter image of an equally false vision of the south. The Italian example reveals that the ‘southern problem’ was not always unique to the Kingdom of Naples, even in comparatively recent times, and that other factors both united and divided what is now Italy in ways not given the prominence they deserve. Geography remains central but not in terms of physical reductionism; regions are not just delimited areas but ones with long-established social and political traits.10 There are many affinities between conditions in the states of the future de´partements re´unis and those in the southern kingdom, and they are of real significance for the history of modern Italy. That the states of northern and central Italy were possessed of isolated, recalcitrant mountain hinterlands is the most powerful proof possible that backwardness and the weakness of the state in such conditions were not the preserve of the southern part of the peninsula. This chapter assents to Franca Assante’s assessment, made primarily with reference to the economy, ‘Every province has its own “South,” its own dualisms between backward and dynamic sectors.’11 This in no way contradicts the importance of the political differences between Naples and the states of the north and centre, but it does alter many general assumptions about the nature of regionalism. Fernand Braudel detected a unique element in the Apennine spine by contrasting it to the Alps. He rightly insisted on the unique character of the Alps among the mountains of the Mediterranean basin as exceptional ‘from the point of view of resources, collective disciplines, the quality of its human population and the number of good roads’.12 Although vital for local trade, the Apennines did not stand at any of the great crossroads of Europe. Neither were they drawn into the wider pattern of European politics, as were many Alpine communities in the Napoleonic period:

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whereas the great Tyrolean revolt of 1809 spread to parts of the Kingdom of Italy,13 the much larger risings in the central Apennines later that year had no wider affiliations or, indeed, any readily identifiable epicentre or leadership.14 The contrasting characters of these two revolts are emblematic of the different relationships of the Alps and the Apennines to the outside world in general and of their different political relationships to their respective ‘centres’ in particular. The Alps were a busy crossroads; the Apennines – the core of ‘French Italy’ – are much closer to Braudel’s general dictum: ‘mountain freedom’.15 This is a defining element of the political culture of the Apennine periphery and its relationship to the urban cores of the states of the ancien re´gime. It is not my purpose to judge the claims of some Italian politicians that a northern bloc – Padania – is a contemporary reality.16 However, there is a strong argument that such a concept has no relevance to Italy in the century before unification. Thus there may be a wider, if unpopular, historical lesson in this case study. This chapter sets itself the unfashionable task of seeing the past on its own terms, and is suspicious of tracing too many contemporary assumptions even to the fairly recent past. The roots of regionalism – seen by many as the best antidote to the myth of nationalism – may be very shallow, indeed. So, too, might the notion among some proponents of ‘Orientalism’ of Europe itself as a cultural whole.17 In other words, the past was different and, if seen on its own terms, does not always provide a ready guide to the present, save in the clouds it dispels. It is well to remember the usefulness of the tools of historical geography in the task of rethinking regional configurations and their historical significance. The profession has long embraced the importance of the frontier and its corollary, the heartland, often with seismic results.18 Indeed, history and geography mix best, but also most blatantly, in areas where there is a clear frontier, and where crude political expansion has dominated the history of a given part of the world. In such cases, historians must assume physical geography as the first given. However, there is a need, well understood by historical geographers, to make a clear distinction between frontiers and peripheries. Daniel Nordman, working in a French context, points to the unique character of the frontier, because it is inseparable from the idea of extension and expansion; its dimensions are elastic.19 This is not the same as the periphery, which is best understood as the hinterlands of

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a state or region, linked to a central core, perhaps not even distant from the core, but rendered relatively remote from it by permanent geographic conditions. Unlike the frontier, peripheries need not carry the connotations of emphatic rupture. Equally, the concept of the centre – as serving political, cultural, or economic foci – offers historians nuanced possibilities of definition, particularly important in periods of convulsed political history, such as imperial expansion, when the roles of the ecumene can alter suddenly. Moving from the psychological to the political, Giddens equates the periphery with ‘back regions,’ by which those on the periphery ‘sustain a psychological distancing between their own interpretations of social processes and those enjoined by “official norms”’,20 a conceptualisation well suited to the relationship between the Apennine valleys and their centres. Yet even so careful a formulation as this is not perfect in all circumstances. Social theorists stress the domination of centre over periphery, either economically or through some form of social closure that rendered those on the periphery as inferior ‘others’.21 The example of ancien re´gime Italy shows the complexities of historical realities against which such broad theories must be measured, and nuanced. The Italian peripheries looked to their centres for judicial wisdom and arbitration, for noble patronage, and for food in times of crisis through the system of public granaries – the annona22 – which were powerful weapons of social control under the old order. However, the peripheries had their own weapons in these games: as route centres, they controlled supplies and smuggling activities; physical remoteness made the state and official culture – sacred and profane – come to them, being adapted and altered in the process. Foreigners on the Grand Tour arguably had a more conventional view of the Italian centres than their hinterlands, recognising at least their traditional cultural domination.23 Nevertheless, if not slavishly applied as abstract models to complex historical sets of circumstances, these concepts drawn from historical geography can help the historian grasp the fluid nature of regional boundaries, particularly in parts of the world that have long been settled but where fundamental change is also inherent. Modern Italy provides an obvious example. Recognising the distinction between frontier and periphery – and the complex nature of the centre – has greatly illuminated the nature of ancien re´gime Italy; political historians of the post-unification period are also increasingly alert to their role as the

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determining agents in shaping the contours of Italian regionalism.24 However, other studies have also pointed to the importance and further refinement of the concepts of centre and periphery, as in Qing China and Massachusetts in the Early Republic.25 The difference between frontiers and peripheries and their relationships to the centre assume particular importance in the context of powerful states capable of changing political geography through conquest. When swamped and abolished by imperial expansion, border zones can become localised peripheries, now surrounded by and part of a larger, more powerful state. Their former central cores become the ecumene of the new empire, well-settled urbanised regions no longer synonymous with the centres of political power. The periphery, though a more fluid concept than either ‘frontier’ or ‘central core’, is of singular importance to the historian of empire, given the propensity for such regions to fuel unrest and change. An ever-widening ‘middle ground’ was formed by the convergence of ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’ regions in north-western Europe in late antiquity, which eventually saw this periphery swamp the Roman Empire when its central core weakened. In Britain, during the period prior to the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603, the ‘weak border zone’ between the two countries, long a source of lawlessness, became an internalised periphery. Its marginal bandit society was smashed within a decade, while the real frontier of the British kingdoms became the Highland line, further north.26 In each of these cases, their great diversity notwithstanding, the importance of the periphery – as opposed to the true frontier – is clear for the process of state development.27 It assumes a central place in the development of powerful, expansionist states, quite distinct from that of the frontier, simply because they have the power to transform ‘weak borders’ into internalised peripheries. Indeed, peripheries in areas of small, exposed states are essentially ‘weak borders’ between two similar communities on the edge of their respective states, as opposed to a true frontier, where very different societies face each other over enforceable lines of demarcation.28 This is the first, most fundamental stage in the process of imperial expansion. It can be achieved gradually, as in British India or Qing China, or by swift, brutal conquest, as in Spanish Latin America; it emerges as the result of economic and social processes, as in Massachusetts, or through political consensus, as in Britain after the Union of Crowns in 1603.

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The periphery reveals what powerful polities sweep away. They are often, if hardly universally, the product of the interaction of weak central control and difficult physical geography, imposed not only – and often not even – by geographic obstacles but by the weakness of the state. Such governments ruled only indirectly, and so the collective tradition of practical experience in most early modern European states was to rely on the politics of mediation and arbitration between local interests, mixed with sporadic incursions into their peripheries, best described as ‘government at one remove’, in the context of early modern Scotland.29 The states of ancien re´gime Italy, without exception, conform to this pattern. They had this in common with the Tudors, who faced none of the natural obstacles posed by the Apennine spine but needed ‘to persuade or convince their subjects to remain passive through a generally accepted theory of obligation and submission’.30 Transforming this situation was exactly the purpose of imperial expansion, when conquest gave way to governance. French imperial expansion in Italy offers just such an example of the role of geography during a brusque change of regime. Napoleonic imperialism was remarkable for its cultural coherence, based on an eclectic but very conscious blending of the cultural heritage of seventeenth-century French absolutism with the political and administrative centralism of the French Revolution of the 1790s, shorn of its democratic elements. However warped this view of its heritage may have been, it nonetheless gave the empire a well-defined centre-France in cultural terms, Paris for practical administration to which all else was subject and on which all else had to model itself. Thus all previously existing central cores, whether political or cultural in their influence, were now subordinate and superfluous in the new imperial order. Further, their peripheries were to be reduced to greater levels of conformity and administrative control, to the point – it was hoped – that they would cease to be peripheries. The French were the first masters of Italy to lump the centre and periphery together into an undesirable mass, but this, in turn, pulled their policy in two contradictory directions. Having utterly discredited and discarded the traditional cores of the de´partements re´unis as all but spatial bases, rejecting them as sources of authority in terms of both personnel and values, they also exerted levels of control – as distinct from an authority – over the Italian peripheries never witnessed before.

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The French despatched first their soldiers, then their gendarmes, and finally their administrators to the Apennine spine in unprecedented numbers and with unheralded potency. The resources of a huge empire were now flung at some of the most ungoverned parts of Europe, and French efforts were further aided by the very completeness of Napoleonic hegemony over Italy, which transformed the Apennine peripheries from weak border zones into islands surrounded by the lowland and urban central cores, now all under French control. The periphery had finally been breached by the state, but the French chose to do it almost alone. Here is the manifestation of a particular form of imperialism, where the ability to master geography allowed the new masters to all but dispense with indigenous collaboration. In this case, the ultimate failure of the imperial model to take root was not in its inability to master geography but in its very strength. The intensive introduction of the people of the de´partements re´unis to the ways of the modern state did not embrace meaningful participation in a model of public administration, much less an exercise in selfgovernment. Their experience of Napoleonic rule was not one of ‘nationbuilding’. John Davis rightly argues that the ‘advanced’ northern regions of post-unification Italy provide ‘endless examples of the survival of forms of private power and influence that remained almost untouched by the presence or realities of the State until 1900 or beyond’.31 An examination of the north under Napoleon, sensitive to historical geography, helps answer why. After 1814, arbitrational political culture and the independence of the periphery soon reasserted itself. The ‘natural unit’ based on the traditional cores returned as a fact of life, and remained so after unification in 1859, although these natural units do not correspond readily with those regarded as axiomatic in modern Italy. The Catholic Church and the landowning elites, both outside the experience of Napoleonic rule, resumed the direction of the cores. It is not surprising that local elites schooled in the politics of intimate, personal relationships between rulers and ruled resented unification and ‘continued to address suppliche in the old style to indifferent offices’.32 Their powerful presence in local life soon forced the unitary state to abandon plans for regional devolution and drove it down a centralising, authoritarian road.33 The failure of the French to incorporate Italians into state service then made Italian regionalism the preserve of reaction.34 Napoleonic rule made a powerful, if often blunt,

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impact on Italy, but in its workings were revealed more fundamental geopolitical truths. Napoleon attacked Italian political geography with the same verve and audacity he showed in battle. French rule in Italy was a ruthless exercise in imperialism, conquest, and state-building. It was an assault on the routines of both space and time, as mapped by Giddens.35 Between 1800 and 1814, Napoleon shattered the state system Philip II had sanctioned in Italy during the sixteenth century, and that had endured ever since; there had been many changes of dynasty but few alterations to the borders of the Italian states. Napoleon now replaced its nine major polities36 with three units. These were the satellite Kingdom of Naples, in the south, based on the existing territorial state there, which he gave first to his elder brother Joseph and then to his cavalry commander and brother-in-law Joachim Murat; the Kingdom of Italy, centred on Milan and Bologna in the north and centre, of which he was himself king, but which he entrusted to his stepson Eugene de Beauharnais, to which the Veneto was added in 1807; and finally, a third unit composed of many former states, all of which were annexed directly to France, the de´partements re´unis.37 This thoroughgoing attempt to break the mould ended with his fall in 1814, and there followed a general if not complete restoration of the pre-Napoleonic status quo. Italian physical geography proved rather more difficult to reduce than the small, weak states that made up its political geography, however. The doyen of Annaliste history, Fernand Braudel, began his great ‘total history’ of the Mediterranean thus: ‘It is, above all, a sea ringed by mountains,’ affirming the enduring presence of geography in politics in the early modern Mediterranean, Italy included.38 Braudel’s point is universal; it applies in any set of historical circumstances where a state must struggle to achieve a ‘deep and widely ramified impress upon the landscape by the functioning of effective central authority’.39 That same Mediterranean topography had helped shape a subtle but tenacious political culture, and the need to crush that culture was brought home to the French very early. The pan-Italian, expressly antiFrench revolts of 1799 were all launched from the periphery, but they also showed the French that, on their own terms and when they chose, the communities of the Apennine periphery could unite and come to the aid of the centre, in its hour of greatest need.40 On their return, after 1800, the French drew from this the obvious lessons that the periphery

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was hostile to them and capable of a collective resistance belied by its fragmented topography and vendetta-ridden local politics, as well as that their own network of ideological collaborators – the ‘patriots,’ or giacobini were too lacking in local influence to provide real stability for the new regime, even if there were often enough of them to staff its administration. However profound the idealistic example set by the ‘Italian Jacobins’ for future generations,41 their contribution to Napoleonic state-building, if hardly negligible, was essentially inadequate. What the new rulers did not discern was the complex relationship between centre and periphery in ancien re´gime Italy. The political culture of the periphery was highly atomised. Yet in this fragmentation of power lay its common identity. Bishops, magistrates, and enlightened reformers alike lamented any lack of clear leadership beyond local heads of families over most of the Apennines, which set these areas apart from the hinterlands of the Kingdom of Naples, where there was not only an over-mighty baronage to block the centre but also a ready ‘alternative’: aspiring elites in the rural bourgeoisie, the galant’uomini, and in the municipal councils – the universitates – where they contested power with the baroni, even if they ultimately proved ineffective without backing from a weak centre. Although Napoleonic reforms were also thwarted by the feudal barons, they were not without support.42 Conversely, in the north, the absence of a powerful feudal nobility engendered local factions on the periphery that were independent of all authority and so traditionally less inclined to look to the centre for leadership or support. The influence of the Genoese patricians on the clans of the Fontanabuona was just that – influence, not power. Without local power bases, their influence was so indirect that even Ernest Gellner’s theory that patronage arises from ‘territorially incomplete centralisation’ seems too structured.43 All this is underpinned by the ways information flowed from the periphery to the centre, the point being that it was on the periphery’s terms. The Counter-Reformation Church exercised great moral force on the periphery, as did many civil magistrates, but bishops, Inquisitors, and civil magistrates alike were dependent on denunciations of individuals or groups by others in what they were given to act upon, not on information gathered by their own agents.44 When Italians chose to go to law, it was to use the courts as a way to attack their enemies; all the magistracy could often do was weigh the evidence before it, not pursue its own inquiries, nor was going to law any guarantee that vendettas were not pursued

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simultaneously.45 The hard truth of political life was that what went up did not always come down, and, when it did, it was when the highlands so decided. This Apennine spine was in great part defined by a political culture shaped by the ability of the periphery to force the centre into a reactive style of government. Any examination of the relationship between the central governments of the Italian states and the communities of their peripheries prior to Napoleon is a salutary lesson for historians attracted to the concept of a steady advance of the modern state under the influence of enlightened thought. There was plenty of enlightened reform, at least on paper, in the late eighteenth century, although this varied widely from state to state; Tuscany was its fulcrum, Piedmont and Parma knew it only partially, Liguria not at all.46 It did not move mountains, however, any more than the religious zeal of the CounterReformation had done before it. This is not to argue that neither of these intellectual currents had no influence on the periphery; it was rather that the periphery was independent enough to absorb or reject them as it wished, and on its own terms. The response of the Tuscan periphery to the reforms of Peter-Leopold in the 1780s exemplifies this. While his attempts to free the grain trade and curb popular religiosity provoked ferocious and successful revolts, his legal reforms, which softened criminal penalties generally and abolished capital punishment, were well received and enhanced the reputation of the magistracy.47 This contrasts with the relative ease he had in weakening urban guilds and confraternities.48 On the periphery, direct attempts at change were unenforceable; influence, on the other hand, might endure. The three main sources of influence at the disposal of the centre were those of government at one remove. They were the moral authority of the Church (and its information-gathering techniques), the ability of senior civil magistrates to arbitrate serious local disputes, and the informal links of patronage (clientelismo) exercised by wealthy patricians from the urban centre on the hinterland. The Italian periphery, defined as a moral barrier to the values of the centre – as opposed to an area of different social and economic character where state authority was ephemeral – was invented by the Jesuits and other missionary orders in the sixteenth century, when they compared the levels of spiritual, cultural, and moral degeneration they perceived in the communities of the Apennine spine with those they had first encountered among the native peoples of the New World.49

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In the centuries that followed, the burden of making real the concept of ‘social control’ fell to the Counter-Reformation Church, and it poured its missionaries and inquisitors into the periphery, as Napoleon later would pour his soldiers and police. Peripheral provinces and communities ignored or defied the centre, but they were drawn into networks of patronage, informal in character but closely linked to the state and emanating from that same centre. Peripheral communities and families were semi-dependent on members of ruling elites but not on the state as such. Generally, the Italian peripheries drew the centre into local politics as a source of mediation or patronage, essentially on local terms, and through processes acquiesced in by the centre rather than resented by it.50 Even the Savoyard monarchy, an absolutism unique among Italian states, proved to have feet of clay in French eyes. The royal legislation, the Reali Costituzioni, neither negated nor replaced local statutes or the traditional norms of provincial legal culture,51 and, when the centre challenged the independence of the periphery, it did not find lasting success.52 Thus a vibrant, atomised provincial political culture survived, underneath, and largely unhampered by, the monarchy.53 Napoleonic administrators were struck more by the gaps in Savoyard absolutism than by any resemblance to their own ancien re´gime. They decried both the powerful influence wielded by noble patrons over senior magistrates and the more general leniency accorded criminals by the monarchy: ‘they avoid proper punishment for all these offences . . . taking advantage of amnesties granted by the king, on various occasions’54 – hardly an image of unbending absolutist centralism. Influence made the world go round, not brute force or reforming initiatives, and there were many complex, intricate ties through which it could work.55 Few of them were readily grasped by the French progenitors of the modern state, however. That they snapped them so readily was due more to their contempt for the cultural values of the ancien re´gime elites at the centre than to the nature of the periphery. Owen Lattimore observed in an essay on the frontier that: whether two communities that are set apart from each other . . . are similar in a general way like France and Italy, or notably dissimilar like India and Tibet, the maximum difference is to be sought near the centre of gravity of each country and not at the frontier where they meet.56

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That France and Italy are generally thought of as similar in a general way was not the perspective of those contemporaries involved most directly in empire-building. From their vantage point, Lattimore probably had it the wrong way round. The closer the imperial agents of the French centre got to the old centres of the states of the Apennine spine, the less they found in common with them. The wider point, however, is that the real differences between cultures emerge when their centres meet and interact. David A. Bell’s vision of a French elite imbued with ‘the perception of God’s withdrawal from the world,’ and their belief in ‘society’ as an autonomous arena of human activity,57 finds its fullest expression in their abhorrence of Italian elite culture in its traditional centres. Here lies the true break with the past under Napoleon: Italian elite culture was a thing of loathing to the new order, and so the central cores of the old states became obsolete for all but functional purposes. Rather, they became the ecumene, ciphers in an imperial system dependent on Paris. The French did not readily attribute the political culture of the Italian centre to geography; they saw it as the result of cultural decadence, hastened by Baroque Catholicism.58 Unlike the fury of the periphery, the passivity of the centre was to be pitied rather than feared.59 Confronted with this supposed heritage, the fundamental intellectual assumption of the new regime was, simply, that it had nothing to learn from the old order. The French were confronted with alien political worlds in the de´partements re´unis, with only the partial exception of Piedmont. A political culture shaped in accordance with the periphery, not the centre, was anathema to them; thus the incompatibility of old and new ruling elites and their utter inability to work together had direct repercussions for how the French dealt with the periphery. First, they felt it imperative to push the old elites aside. The powerful state and vast human resources they possessed made it possible to do this by importing their own personnel into Italy at almost every level of the administration. They then systematically uprooted the subtle, opaque ties that bound the periphery to the centre, even as they stamped their own authority on the former as no previous regime had ever been able to do. However, as an exercise in the policy of rallying and amalgamating local elites to the empire – a policy cherished by the regime, in theory60 – this was an abject admission of failure. A desire to work with

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and through traditional sources of authority is common among new imperial regimes; the French had this much in common with experiences as diverse from their own as the British in India or Hernando Cortes in Mexico.61 However, in their Italian provinces at least, they felt compelled to abandon such aspirations. The new regime regarded the cities and plains as, at best, ‘safe bases’, in a purely military sense. In contrast to its presence in the equally hostile environment of western France, for example, the Napoleonic state in the Italian de´partements re´unis could not even claim to be a ‘regime of the towns’ in terms of its sources of support.62 The French sought to shift the core, as a ‘phenomenon of the realm of values’,63 even if they accepted the spatial logic of all the ancien re´gime capitals, by making them into imperial departmental and regional centres, but the authority working from them had changed utterly. The French quickly introduced gendarmerie brigades composed wholly of Frenchmen and, later, Piedmontese, into the countryside, together with their network of tribunals, whose criminal sections and highest officials were also usually French or Piedmontese. The highest tribunals, the Cour d’Appel, followed the same pattern. None of the major prefectures that centred on the ancien re´gime capitals of Turin, Genoa, Florence, or Rome was ever entrusted to an Italian, nor were any but French prefects deployed in Liguria, the duchies, Tuscany, or the Papal States.64 Above them presided the real power in the land, the three regional directors-general of police for the de´partements re´unis – all French – in Turin, Florence, and Rome. Moreover, these superior officials, both departmental and supra-regional, were not sedentary. The prefects toured their departments at every conscription levy, usually four times a year, and the directors-general of police also did extensive if less regular tours. Thus the French advanced the policing of the periphery well beyond anything conceivable under the ancien re´gime, within a few months of annexing a particular state.65 Nor were these efforts always or universally unappreciated by Italians. French hopes of winning local support through effective, even-handed, and professional policing proved to be one of the few aspects of imperial rule to find indigenous approval, at least among the propertied classes, which often included the peasantry in many parts of the periphery. Their achievement in this area is all the more remarkable because the work of the imperial security forces was seriously compromised everywhere by

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the hated policy of conscription,66 and the ability of later regimes to match their standards of policing was often a yardstick of their popularity – or lack of it – among the propertied classes under the Restoration.67 It was, nonetheless, a service provided for the ruled by the rulers, the work not only of a foreign institution but one staffed almost wholly by foreigners. The experience, even at its most positive, was, indeed, passive. Effectively, the Italian elites of the de´partements re´unis were allowed only the most subordinate role by the new regime. The two most powerful influences in the Napoleonic state were its repressive forces, concentrated in the Ministry of Police-General, and the Civil Code, administered by the Ministry of Justice. These two elements held each other in check, existing in a perpetual tension that was mediated in the Council of State, but few Italians played senior roles in either ministerial apparatus. When the realities of power and influence within the Napoleonic state are remembered, the empty experience of the departmental colleges for the Italian ‘notables’ who composed them emerges in full.68 In contrast, even if those Italian administrators who served the Kingdom of Italy at the local level were subjugated to French practices,69 ‘the formation of a technically prepared, modern bureaucracy’ recruited from the lower bourgeoisie and entrusted with extensive responsibilities marked the true contribution of the Napoleonic period in Lombardy and the Emilia-Romagna.70 While stressing the problems the French had in creating a bureaucratic state in Naples, John Davis also notes the enthusiastic participation of the Neapolitan professional classes in the regime, the notable presence of native ministers such as Giuseppe Zurlo in the reform process, and the strengthened position of the rural bourgeoisie under Murat. Many later, distinguished administrators gained their training under the French.71 There were signs among the lower echelons of the administration in Piedmont and Tuscany, where local notables had to be employed, that French professionalism was taking root, but it often sat beside older traditions of entryism and clientelismo.72 However, very few Italians, most of them Piedmontese, were more than passive observers in the process of state-building initiated under Napoleon in the de´partements re´unis.73 The centralised, French-dominated nature of the regime in these regions did not allow the emergence of Piedmontese, Tuscan, Roman, or Parmense equivalents to Melzi, Prina, and Aldini in Milan, or Zurlo and

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Ricciardi in Naples, men who stood at the head of the satellite states.74 The native administrators of the de´partements re´unis were truly fonctionnaires, since genuinely executive office was denied them.75 They had no central ministries of their own to control, and those few Piedmontese who rose high enough, such as Peyretti di Con dove or Ugo Botton, were absorbed into the French elite, never returning.76 The notorious collaboration of the Cavours gained them only the direction of the national stud farm.77 Some Italians, once at the helm of the ancien re´gime, actively sought service in the imperial order but were then met with rejection born of incomprehension by the new rulers. The true extent of the alienation of the old centres of power from the new order emerges here, for this was not a question of dissident voices crying in the wilderness, be it disillusioned patriots or integrist clergy. Rather, it reveals a bewildered elite, who sought acceptance by a system it did not understand and that could find no place for it. This was especially so among the legal classes. Parma, with its prestigious university – closed by the French in 1805 – was a poignant repository of a rejected ex-elite of jurisconsultes. It was in the exclusion of the old elites from the process of taming the periphery that French contempt for them really emerges, however. The periphery was something the French both feared and respected, and it is revealing that they tended to regard the problem of the peripheries as being an absence of conventional authority, whereas the traditional cores suffered from bad government. The director-general of police in Rome saw the former as much preferable to the latter, at least in the case of the upland communities of Umbria, part of the hinterland of the former Papal States. Their climate and their distance from Rome had allowed them ‘to preserve the purity of their original identity and the memory of their history’. The ephemeral presence of papal authority had saved the Umbrians from a worse state than isolation: ‘being further from the metropolis, they have borne the yoke of the priests far less, and their industriousness has more easily resisted the influence of [the] government’.78 The very existence of traditional forms of authority was, therefore, harmful to a people; despite the many problems involved, virgin soil was preferable to the presence of the ancien re´gime. The French despised the deposed Italian elites for the social degeneration produced by government at one remove. During the 1809 revolt in central Italy, the

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French police commissioner of Genoa declared it essential to impress on ‘these turbulent, unsubmissive valley folk’ that ‘we are no longer in the age when a handful of peasant rebels from the valleys could frighten the city and dictate laws to the government’.79 The legacy of the weak, intermittent rule of the old republic was, to the Prefect of Genoa, ‘a country where heads are naturally hot, and where rifles don’t wait to be fired’,80 where the tail of the periphery wagged the dog of the centre.81 Local magnates, too, had a laudable, if very worrisome, capacity to ignore authority, such as the Colonna, feudal barons in the Roman Apennines, ‘who have shaken off papal authority several times, and who have always been independent’, with the net result that ‘there is even savagery among the richest landowners’.82 They were prime movers and patrons in the political culture of vendetta but hardly conventional sources of authority. The French had the power and determination to challenge this culture, but they lacked the ability to learn from any experience but their own. On the periphery, it proved easier to establish the administrative skeleton of French rule where no great baronage impeded them, yet the absence of aristocratic authority posed problems of its own. The periphery lacked ‘the natural leadership of the local community by its nobles in the interests of staving off civil disorder, not promoting it’.83 There was no one with the financial resources or inherent authority throughout the northern and central Apennines to provide such leadership for such ends.84 However, the casting aside of the elites at the centre, of their political culture and the methods of social control rooted in them, made the French presence less assured than it might outwardly appear. They compounded this by their deep suspicion of the Church, acquired during the French Revolution. When this history of bad relations culminated in the excommunication of Napoleon by Pius VII in 1809, it destroyed even the pretence of a working partnership between Church and state throughout Italy. The imperial regime could never count on the only Italian institution that had always transcended ancien re´gime borders, and that took a sustained interest in extending the influence of the centre to the periphery.85 Where once the confessional had been an almost standard source of information and a powerful instrument of social control,86 the rupture with the Church turned it into an active source of fear for the French. One senior French official called the Ligurian clergy nothing less than ‘this powerful corps,

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which from time immemorial has been able to rouse the people of town and country at its will’, now able to turn on them the ‘ever more dangerous confessional, against which the police are powerless’. They had a long experience of ‘using the conscience to manipulate the human passions . . . of fostering an anathema for evidence, by recourse to superstition,’ and so were able to unsettle a government.87 This is more than a recognition of influence, however; it is an admission of defeat. In their determination to impose the Civil Code on Italy, the French snapped another effective link between centre and periphery. Justice at every level in the small states of the ancien re´gime had been essentially arbitrational, because magistrates were respected as mediators, and they valued this role: ‘tribunals preferred to compose . . . conflicts, because the judge saw himself as the arbiter responsible for public order’.88 In Liguria, Osvaldo Raggio believes that ‘the administration of criminal justice was an area that assumed central significance and linked the government of the localities [with the centre]’.89 Only in this traditional way could the intellectually sophisticated jurisprudence of the centre hope to penetrate the periphery. The instant imposition of the Code strangled at birth that process of ‘the carefully crafted legal pluralism’, the working through a hierarchy of indigenous tribunals to the apex of foreign, Imperial Courts – the ultimate but not sole arbiters – which allowed the emergence of cultural intermediaries inside the legal system, as the British sought to foster in India.90 Within and beyond the legal sphere, the French needed such intermediaries; the de´partements re´unis were almost a paradigm of a state operating in ‘an idiom as yet unintelligible to a large part of its population, who need brokers (lawyers, politicians, or characteristically, both at once)’.91 This was all too alien, retrograde and, arguably, too subtle, for the French to grasp. The French mastered the Italian periphery more than any previous regime. It is a tribute to their powers of organisation, the ruthless professionalism of their bureaucracy and police, and the sheer resources at their disposal that they did so without significant help from the traditional elites of the region. They advanced the presence of the state in places and in ways their predecessors had never dared to go. Even in areas they occupied for only a few years, such as Tuscany or the Papal States, their ability to wring taxes and conscripts from the periphery, or to catch its bandits, was extraordinary. The Napoleonic state was able to overcome the perennial obstacle of Italian geography prior to the

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invention of the railroad or the telegraph, to say nothing of more modern technologies. Yet, although they changed the way the de´partements re´unis were ruled, their failure to win support for their methods, or to impart them to Italians, ensured that the older realities of geography reasserted themselves after 1814, although those realities were not identical to the accepted regional divisions of Italy today. The French controlled their Italian provinces, but they did not acculturate them. Although the French imposed a single system of government on these hitherto diverse states, their reconfiguration of Italy also revealed regional complexities, and this is a lesson in the shifting nature of supposed demarcations that historians and politicians take too readily for granted. In part, new political boundaries can expose established realities. The new circumstances of imperial rule, then, were a catalyst for exposing the half-hidden truths of geohistory, in this case the underlying unity of the Apennine spine. Macro-regions may appear to be traditional subdivisions of nation states, almost to the point of being submerged nations themselves. In reality, however, they can have far more fluid histories. Methodologically, the case of Napoleonic Italy both vindicates and qualifies the assertion of Anthony Giddens that ‘regions of considerable span necessarily tend to develop upon a high degree of institutionalisation’.92 It is disproved, in one sense, by the revelation that a macro-region can exist across the boundaries of states with differing institutional histories, as under the ancien re´gime. Equally, the relative – if transient – triumph of the Napoleonic state on the Italian periphery fits it perfectly. Such are the perils and profits of applying theory to historical realities. The accepted concepts of historical geography can add considerable understanding to the process of imperialism. Specifically, the penetration of the centre by the periphery underlines imperial expansion as a process of discovery for the new rulers and identifies the area of most intense change for their new subjects. Like many explorers, however, the French often failed to understand what they found, and respected it even less. Simultaneously, the interaction of old and new centres, transformed by empire-building, locates the public and private space where the capacity for acculturation is tested most. Above all, the terms themselves open up new perspectives for the historian, if applied with due respect to differing historical circumstances. When the periphery is distinguished

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carefully from the frontier, the former, more than the latter, emerges as the sector where a powerful state can be differentiated from a weak one, because peripheries are where states must work to assert their authority. They are the ‘testing grounds’ of brute force. By contrast, the interactions of centres, to return to Lattimore’s insight, are the testing grounds of the possibilities of acculturation; by identifying them, and gauging their relationships, the cultural and political similitude between cultures, or lack of it, can be gauged at their respective hearts. Imperial relationships, particularly, respond to the tools of historical geography. New dimensions of the process of imperialism can emerge once it is conceived of in terms of geographic space.

PART II THE LAW OF THE FRENCH

3 A CLASH OF ENLIGHTENMENTS:JUDICIAL REFORM IN THE NAPOLEONIC REPUBLIC AND KINGDOM OF ITALY 1

T

he Republic/Kingdom of Italy was the jewel in the crown of Napoleon’s hegemony. Its artery, the Po valley, encompassed some of the richest, best developed agricultural land in western Europe and was studded with cities whose urban cultures and wealth, drawn from the surrounding countryside, were among the oldest in Europe. It was the land of milk and honey into which Napoleon had led his famished, ragged troops, in 1796, and so it continued to be for his empire. The new state he forged in the region in the triennio, 1796– 9, was swiftly reconstituted after his definitive re-conquest of northern and central Italy in 1800, and it remained that part of his empire he valued most, second only to France, thereafter. The core of the Italian state, Lombardy, had been the single wealthiest, most productive province of the Habsburg Empire, its tax revenues yielding more to Vienna than all the lands of the Crown of St Stephen, combined. The original pivot of Napoleon’s first ‘sister republic’, the short-lived Cispadane, was the Marches, the modern Emilia-Romagna, with its regional capital at Bologna; it was by far the richest, most advanced component of the Papal States. The third component of the original Italian Republic was the Duchy of Modena,

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which had been ruled by a succession of reforming dukes since the mid 1770s, who had modernised its institutions, waged bitter legal battles with its feudal nobility and clergy, and forged a new class of bureaucrats and magistrates, imbued with progressive absolutist concepts of government.2 Each of these regions had its mountainous, backward hinterlands, but their urban centres stood at the centre of European intellectual and cultural life; their lowlands were the focus of a capitalintensive, highly advanced and profitable agriculture. Only the acquisition of the Republic of St Mark, in 1807, brought territories into the Kingdom of Italy which possessed neither a public sphere imbued with progressive ambitions nor a vibrant economy. Nevertheless, the former Venetian Republic still contained important urban centres and sophisticated elites, however politically obscurantist by the standards of the other components of the new state. The Napoleonic Republic/Kingdom of Italy was anything but a backwater. Nevertheless, sophistication brought problems of its own, quite different from those Napoleon encountered in the more far-flung geographically remote parts of his hegemony. The well-educated, wealthy elites of his Italian satellite state had developed their own intellectual and political culture. It had been invigorated by fresh currents of thought conceived entirely in the self-avowedly new ideas of the radical enlightenment; its roots remained in a more traditional Humanism, of which the great Italian cities had been the cradle. Put simply, many Italians had their own ideas about a reformed, enlightened political future, and this embraced those very well disposed to Napoleonic rule, just as much as those who accepted it with reluctance. All this turns on a challenge to Peter Gay’s once axiomatic assertion that ‘there was only one Enlightenment’.3 Jonathan Israel has recently emphasised the importance of the division between conservative or moderate enlightenments, and the radical enlightenment, which he feels gained ascendancy only in France in the mid eighteenth century,4 while refuting the concept of specifically ‘national’ enlightenments, so diffuse and ubiquitous were the currents of intellectual exchange in the Western world.5 The imperial framework which brought the satellite Italian state under Napoleonic hegemony, and which amalgamated the lands of that state, provides fertile ground to examine these configurations. The debates over the direction of legal reform emerged as a crucial sphere for philosophical differences to arise in the life of the

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Republic/Kingdom of Italy. The law was at the heart of most visions of enlightened reform, conservative or radical, and the discussions surrounding the nature of the legal codes projected for the new state brought differences and similarities among Italians, and between Italians and their French masters, into clear relief. Whether any ‘national’ or regional attempt to evaluate the concept of ‘enlightenment’ is valid or not, the historical reality of the pre-Napoleonic history of what became the Republic/Kingdom of Italy was one of political fragmentation and intellectual interaction. Its history after the definitive Napoleonic conquest of 1800 was that of abrupt unification and ever-tightening imperial subjugation. It was a process which provoked intellectual interaction, through the need to co-operate and resistance to coercion, because, under Napoleon, major reform became as urgent as it was axiomatic. Northern Italy, a region with a rich intellectual heritage and a vibrant affiliation to all the major currents of thought of the eighteenthcentury enlightenment, found itself within an empire equally imbued with enlightened, reforming ambitions and the power to implement them. The problems arose because their intellectual traditions did not always assimilate to each other. In Habsburg Lombardy, the realities of the late ancien re´gime and revolutionary periods had blunted the undercurrents of conflict that ran throughout the eighteenth century, between reformers who put their faith in the enlightened absolutist reforms driven by Joseph II, and those who saw the dynamism of the region as centred on its powerful traditions of municipal independence. In the Marches, reformers had always focused on the retention or re-conquest of municipal autonomy from the Papacy as the only means of preserving their prosperity and intellectual freedom, until the arrival of the French. The Venetian Republic stood aside from all of this. Only the Duchy of Modena provided a continuous tradition of statist absolutism, a state too small to encompass the traditions of municipalism as a rival focus for loyalty and progressive reform. Thus, the Napoleonic model of centralised absolutism found a mixed reception in all the territories of the new state which had been its master’s first power base. Quite apart from those elements within the elites still loyal to their respective ancien re´gimes, and those who had always opposed assaults on noble, municipal and clerical privilege, the elites of the Republic/Kingdom were the products of intellectual traditions too rich and too varied simply to accept the

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template of Napoleonic France at face value or without argument. Joseph II had already faced the wrath of many Lombards, few of them obscurantist reactionaries, who had seen his ruthless centralisation as assault on their prosperity and their vision of progress, but he had also won significant support. These territories – with the notable exception of Venice – became among the most assimilated to the system of government and justice that came out of Napoleonic France. Napoleon’s avowed policy was to clone every facet of the Italian public sphere to the model he had established in France, and he found support, predictably, among those who had adhered to Joseph II. Equally, there were serious reservations about what might be lost from indigenous reforming impulses, if Napoleon’s exercise in cloning went unmodified. It was not just their existing institutions and practices that Italian reformers feared, for, in truth, they welcomed the extinction of much of the ancien re´gime. Rather, many feared that their own hopes for a reformed future would be swept away by an imported, foreign template for government. These disputes did not emerge as readily in the realm of administration as in the reform of the law, for the need to provide a centralised structure on the Napoleonic model was clear to almost all who accepted the task of ruling the new state. Its composite nature required a high degree of administrative uniformity and cohesion, for its very survival.6 It was very different with the relentless Napoleonic drive to impose replicas of the French legal codes on the Republic/Kingdom. Italian jurisprudence possessed its own rich legal traditions, some of which even the most determined reformers adhered to some degree. Not only did each component part of the new state have its own judicial norms, local as well as national, but Italian legal reformers had found, in Cesare Beccaria above all, an expression of progressive hopes – most still unrealised by 1800 – that were not always in complete accord with those of the French. All this was compounded by the serious unrest that plagued the new state throughout its life: as the initial collapse of civil order engendered by the wars of the triennio subsided, a new wave of revolts engulfed many parts of the state later in the period, in response to harsh mass conscription and taxation, on a scale and of a magnitude unknown under the old order. These conditions threatened to destroy the hopes of Italian reformers for the more humane system of justice articulated by Beccaria.

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The independent status of the Republic/Kingdom allowed its magistrates a consultative voice in the work for the new legal system, absent in those parts of Italy directly united to France under Napoleon. Each project for legal reform was the work of committees drawn from the senior magistrates of the state, and was also submitted for comments and advice to all the tribunals across its territories. This genre of source is lacking for the imperial departments of Italy, which received the French system in its entirety, without debate. These sources, conserved in the Archivio di Stato of Milan, offer a valuable insight into both the clash of different reforming intellectual currents, and of the means sought to preserve indigenous hopes for reform against imperial uniformity. They set out the reasoning of those for and against Napoleon, in Pieter Geyl’s indelible phrase.7 Napoleon won the contest, but the arguments that dogged his eventual victory open a window on the nature of Napoleonic imperialism in a region well disposed to its ethos, and shed light on why assimilating an advanced region posed problems for French imperialism which were different from conquering an isolated hinterland, but just as profound.

The problems of codification Where codification of the law had not been achieved in eighteenthcentury Europe, it had been attempted or, at the very least, discussed with enthusiasm. The political elites, in general, and the legal classes, in particular, were not only familiar with the concept, but broadly sympathetic to it, for the process of systematic ordering of information stood at the heart of a rational approach to public life. Conservative opinion found codification easier to accept than many aspects of enlightened reform because it had the powerful precedent of the Justinian Code to support it. Thus, conservative and radical thinkers within and outside the legal profession could align around the concept of codification almost everywhere, and those of the lands of the Republic/Kingdom of Italy were no exception to this. In the particular case of this highly diverse, composite state of recent creation, the need for a coherent set of codes to embrace the whole national territory was felt to be all the more necessary, simply to make the polity work, as the chaos of its early years had shown all who had the responsibility of governing it. As such, the Republic/Kingdom of Italy offers a cardinal

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example of the important place of the need for a common, national legal system as a central part of state-building. In the course of the debates about the new code of civil law – the first stage of reform process which began in 1802 – the fragile nature of the consensus for creating civil, criminal and procedural codes quickly splintered. They were cut short by Napoleon’s decree of 10 May 1805, which simply imposed the French Civil Code on the Kingdom, but not before many Italian legal experts had made their points. The divisions over the nature of codified law emerged on two levels. The first was the most basic, over what form a code should take. More conservative magistrates looked directly to the Justinian example, or to the Prussian Code, which – although deeply imbued by the enlightened concept of rational ordering and categorising – was essentially a systematic reordering of existing laws, purged of the more archaic and unacceptable traditional statutes, particularly in criminal legislation. The other concept was so different from this older approach, rooted in the Justinian model, as to be a rival, not just an alternative. The more radical vision of codification saw it not as an erudite, all-encompassing compilation of the law – as a compendium – but as a framework for interpretation that did not pretend to offer a magistrate, lawyer or prosecutor every precise answer to every judgment but rather a guide to the spirit of the laws. This concept of codification was very much a part of the currents of thought which produced flexible, concise constitutions, as that of the new United States; concision equalled clarity. It soon drew frequent accusations of lack of precision from critics who looked to the Justinian model, and of being bereft of legal scholarship. The differences did not end at the level of organisation, however. Indeed, these two concepts of codification carried enormous ramifications for the nature of the state and the practical administration of justice, and no one in authority in Napoleonic Italy was unaware of this. The French had emphatically chosen the second, more radical, model of codification for a reason, and all debate henceforth stemmed from this. The more traditional form of codification allowed for the incorporation of local statutes into a national framework; it permitted the survival of particularism in the law, if not necessarily in civil administration. In direct contrast, although the more abstract concept of the code, as epitomised by the 1804 Code Napoleon, may have allowed for more discussion among magistrates in the exercise of their judgements, it

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imposed a national framework on them, devoid of any local or regional variations. A more concise, abstract code may have allowed greater scope for interpretation in particular instances, but it did so within uniform legislation that was meant to be harmonious, rather than a systemised encyclopaedia of diversity. It did not provide for a hierarchy of laws, some local, some national and, as such, it became the harbinger of the centralised state. Beyond this constitutional level, the principle of codification raised issues concerning the role and powers of the magistrate in the administration of justice. The seeming latitude accorded judges by the more schematic, abstract approach to codification could be neutered if that code fixed too narrow a tariff of punishments and penalties, particularly where the criminal law was concerned, but also in civil matters. It was feared this could undermine the effective independence of the magistracy just as effectively as too detailed a compendium of laws might, under the more traditional concept of the code. For local magistrates, well below the level of those directly involved in the process of legal reform, the concept of codified law challenged their central, traditional role as arbiters in local disputes, which they often achieved out of court, and out with formal statute law.8 This was something the Napoleonic system recognised, and tried to ameliorate through the institution of the justice of the peace, the lowest rung of the judicial hierarchy, who were actively encouraged to mediate in local disputes where the value of property was fairly insignificant. However, every level of the Italian magistracy, in every part of this diverse state, was exercised by the realities of working within the framework of codified law. Even the most committed champions of the French model saw its potential to reduce the magistracy to mere functionaries, simply applying the precepts of the code to particular cases, and further constrained by too precise a range of punishments they could apply. This assumed a major place in the responses of provincial magistrates, especially, to the work for the new Civil Code, a clear sign that there was not consensus over this most fundamental issue. The problem of flexibility of punishments remained, and went on to become the touchstone for many clashes of opinion on the nature of how the codes would actually work in the context of the Italian state. Both approaches to codification sought to curb the possibility for arbitrary, almost random justice which was widely regarded as a defect of the old order,

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just as the new conditions brought about by the political reality of a new, highly diverse polity imbued most senior magistrates with the urgency of creating a national legal framework. However, the traditional and more radical concepts of codification sought to deal with these problems in utterly different ways. In the preamble to the announcement of on a civil code in 1804, by a committee reformed in the light of the publication of Code Napoleon in France in the same year, the new Minister of Justice, Luosi, accentuated the positive factors that would make the creation of a uniform body of law on the French model possible in the Republic: (I)t was not difficult to do it (draw up a code) among people and provinces, taken together in the similarity of the climate, the correlation in their customs, the conformity of their opinions, and in their religion, their character, nature, and their national spirit This was wishful thinking. The marked similarities among northern Italians Luosi pointed out did, indeed, exist, but experience prior to 1804, and for many years afterwards, proved that these shared customs, character, and their common religion could work as much against as for the adoption of the French model of ‘a uniform Code, in accord with civil laws which . . . amalgamate all the parts which composed the Republic’.9 The different legal experiences of the various parts of the kingdom were, indeed, largely absent from these debates, so widespread was the concern about the impact of the French concept of the code on the workings of justice. Almost perversely, this reveals a shared intellectual and cultural tradition among Lombards, Venetians, Modenesi and Bolognesi provincial magistrates, all concerned to preserve judicial latitude in sentencing and, thus, an element of their role as arbiter, rather than enforcer. Their opposition was also wedded to the belief that Roman law, alone, could provide justification for lasting reform in the mind of a wider public. The reformers had been united initially by negative factors: the need to provide some semblance of uniformity in the face of the composition of the new state; the need to abolish the most hated aspects of ancien re´gime criminal legislation, such as torture or the overuse of the sequestration of property; the desire to end the arbitrary character of justice at its lower levels. It soon became clear this consensus did not stretch far enough, however.

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The Lombards, uniquely, had had direct experience of the process of codification and its implications under Austrian rule. The intimations for the acceptance of the Napoleonic model were not absent, but neither were they wholehearted. Instigated and completed under Joseph II for the provinces of the Habsburg Empire under the Austrian crown, the Allgemeine Gerichtsordning of 1781 – which came into force in Lombady in 1786 – was concerned with procedures, and won support in principle, if not always in detail, among Lombard magistrates of most shades of opinion, exactly because it chose to concentrate on rectifying abuses, through the eradication of arbitrary sentencing. It fell short of overarching reform; it did not alter existing court proceedings, nor did it change statute law in many respects.10 It revealed the power of consensus for limited reform: Joseph’s regulation envisaged that any reform of statute law had to be linked to a reform of procedures, to an assault on arbitrariness, yet in such a way as not to curb unduly the independence of the magistrate to ‘search his intimate conscience’, as so many responses to Napoleonic projects also insisted upon. More significant for the problems Napoleonic reformers would encounter was the moribund work of a commission set up in 1767, to create a civil code for the province. It was headed by Gabriele Verri, the father of Alessandro and Pietro. He was vilified by his sons for his perceived reactionary politics and the lack of humanity shown by his commission. Gabriele Verri’s concept of codification was that of compilation, and he was a tenacious defender of particularism and provincial privilege against Habsburg plans for centralisation. The older Verri believed that the historic roots of the Lombard public sphere were in municipal autonomy, and he used his projected code as a means of preserving and accentuating this to combat Vienna. The result was deadlock. The code was too retrograde for Vienna, but too reformist for the Lombard elites; it was amended and re-amended, until it simply faded away.11 The battle lines the French encountered were already being traced in the last decades of the eighteenth century. When the debate over the form of the codes was crushed in 1805, it shifted from the nature of the code to arguments over judicial autonomy, the place of Roman law in the reformed statutes and, in the new convulsed conditions of the revolution and popular resistance to Napoleonic rule, to a rearguard action to preserve Beccarian Humanism from a state apparatus which resorted to repressive

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measures Italian reformers and conservatives, alike, hoped would remain only provisional, and not deflect forever from so many of their shared aspirations for a more humane criminal law. When Napoleonic reforms introduced root-and-branch reform in the form of the open, public trial, Italians were plunged into a wholly new world, where they found challenges to their perceptions of fairness and humanity, as well as advances. In all this, their responses were remarkably uniform, even in their internal divisions, Napoleonic unification having unearthed a common heritage often quite different from that their reforms sought to engender.

The Civil Code: Conservatism and the conservative enlightenment? The politics of the possible The Napoleonic Civil Code, brought into force in France in 1804, has proved one of the most enduring, widely disseminated legal frameworks in modern history. The first such example was when it was adopted almost in its totality, by the Kingdom of Italy in 1805. Although Napoleon imposed it, he did so in a shared belief with many in the Italian state, that the nature of the law defined a people, and that the new code would, in turn, define the future of Italian society, to a deeper degree than the shape of its civil administration. Its fundamental power as an agent for change was lost on no one. Nevertheless, this did not imply consensus about its impact. Italian disquiet did not disappear in the years between its implementation in 1806 and the end of Napoleonic hegemony in 1814. It would not be an exaggeration to define the debates over the Civil Code as a reflection – if not quite a dramatic struggle over – the soul of the new nation. These disagreements brought into the open many deep divisions between French and Italian magistrates, at philosophical levels, not just in particular points of law. Certain aspects of the Civil Code stirred the most socially conservative prejudices of segments of the magistracy, but just as important was a sense among many Italian legal experts who, while committed to reform of the ancien re´gime statutes according to enlightened precepts, either felt the French template too abstract to confront complex human realities, or felt that Italian society was simply not ready to accept many of the Code’s basic tenets, however desirable they may have been in theory. The Civil Code was meant both to reflect

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the needs of the society it served, and to foster the centrality of individual rights over property and conscience; it was a powerful challenge to ancien re´gime corporatism in all its forms, from noble privilege to the monopoly of conscience claimed by the Church, to the concept of the family. No more challenging ground could have been chosen for a confrontation between traditional society and the new regime set in motion by the French Revolution, at least in the lands of the Kingdom of Italy, but what emerged even more powerfully, were different concepts of how to end the old order. The debates over the Civil Code raised a very dangerous controversy that was crucial to how the new legislation would be judged by that large section of educated Italian public opinion which was not necessarily committed to avowedly enlightened reform, but still hoped for a rationalisation of the existing civil legislation, in accordance with what it regarded as indispensable, if any corpus of law was to be considered morally legitimate and worthy of respect. The relationship between the new code and Roman law – both to the Justinian Code and the more amorphous legal practices generally believed to have their roots in Roman law – became a vital battleground in the process of introducing the Code Napoleon to Italy. It was fought on two broad fronts: the first was the arguments between traditionalists who valued Roman law to the point of seeing it as the only legitimate basis for legislation, and those who had come to see it as a hindrance to progress, and simply rejected it. The second front was more complex, and became a debate among reformers as to whether and how Roman law actually related to the Code Napoleon. The French felt they had managed to reconcile Roman law to the Code Napoleon; Portalis and Chabot, its main spokesmen in the French assemblies, had made impressive efforts to show that their committee had done exactly this.12 Nevertheless, the French saw Roman jurisprudence, in general, and the Justinian Code, in particular, as useful guides to theory, as sources of understanding; they did not regard them as active agents in contemporary legislation.13 The relationship of Roman law to the Code Napoleon was well put by Chabot: on the one hand, Roman law was the ‘source from which flow the great principles and the best systems (of thought) of our legislation’; on the other, however, he made it very clear to law professors who had not absorbed the fact that:

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Roman law, no longer being in force in any part of the Empire, can only be of use if learned as a way of better appreciating our French law; thus, it must no longer be taught, except in its relationship to French law . . . (I)t is essential to remove everything that is alien to our legislation14 They were shocked to find it alive and well, as an active agent in the dispensing of justice among Italian magistrates, conservative and reforming alike, and even more astonished by the widely held belief among Italian magistrates that the Code Napoleon showed scant regard for Roman law. This did not mean the new regime was in anyway deterred. In a proclamation by Luosi to all the tribunals and public prosecutors of the Kingdom, on the eve of the promulgation of the new Italian Civil Code in March, 1806, he threw down a gauntlet to any who believed that Roman law was a secure or desirable foundation for family law, in particular. ‘(T)hose abuses which have no justification other than their antiquity,’ were to be abolished, along with attempts to innovate the law which were the products of the ‘ill considered frenzy’ (of the revolution). Marriage was ‘restored to its proper, secure place’ and the rights of children were now safeguarded from ‘parents who might be too liberal’ with inheritances; the ‘many scandals and endless litigation’ the old, abusive laws had engendered, was now over: The Code Napoleon has purged legislation of these errors. Never more will the wailing of discredited sons be heard before the courts, who have been deprived of their proper support, to the detriment of their father’s memory.15 These were bold words. They challenged the whole structure of the family common to most parts of this otherwise disparate polity. Marriage was now a civil contract, not a sacrament; it was the business of the civil law, not the Church, a clause in the Code which all but made a nonsense of the article of the new constitution of the Kingdom, making Catholicism its official religion. This was but one seismic shift latent in Luosi’s proclamation, however. The rights of children he invoked were those of the equal division of property on inheritance, among all children, regardless of sex, which dealt the death blow not only to

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primogenitor, but to the ability of a father to allocate his property as he saw fit in his will. All of this had been discussed since the triennio; none of it was unknown to Italians, who had watched as the Code Napoleon was enacted in France on just these terms. However, following the long, heated debates about these core issues, Luosi revealed more than he perhaps intended, when he simply referred to the ‘Code Napoleon’, for the subjects of the Kingdom of Italy now knew they were part of a regime that amounted to ‘two countries/one system’. The preceding years yielded evidence that they would not be happy with the most central precepts of the Civil Code: the family and its inheritance laws. It amounted to a revolution which struck deeper at the heart of the ancien re´gime than any purely political reform could possibly hope to do. Luosi, himself, believed as much. His decree declared to his colleagues on the courts of the Kingdom that: (T)he example of a new system of political regeneration, is also of organising the regeneration of the civil law. The foremost jurists of the nation . . . have recast Roman legislation, and joined to it what the needs a modern people have need of.16 He juxtaposed utter incongruities. In asserting the need for regeneration by alien means, Luosi admitted he and his colleagues on the committee regarded their society as retrograde, a feeling not uncommon among many Italian illuministi of the late eighteenth century.17 However, his chosen instrument of regeneration was a foreign innovation, and one which struck at the very foundations of his own culture. In this context, his claim that the new regime had ‘recast’ Roman law ran against reality, and did not correspond to the new Code’s adherence to the precepts set out by Chabot, to exclude Roman law as an active agency in the administration of justice. Talk of ‘regeneration’ was an uncomfortable truth: ‘recasting’ Roman law was a lie. Consequently, much of the opposition the French encountered turned on the continuing respect of many Italian magistrates for Roman law as a living practice. The French Code was continually questioned in its fundamental details over inheritance and the nature of marriage, but more basic still was their contestation of the very concept of the individual within the family unit espoused by the Code Napoleon,

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which they believed contrasted irreconcilably with the norms of Italian society, derived in the main from Roman law. In more conservative hands, this was the dispute from which all else stemmed, for it embraced a clash of visions of society, of personal freedom and collective rights, and of whether the ethos of society itself, as embodied in the law, was secular or religious. The Code’s insistence on individualism and secularism, encapsulated in the equal division of property and the contractural nature of marriage, marked the culmination of a century of the gradual secularisation of French elite society, in its approach to practical affairs, as encapsulated by David Bell’s observation that, quietly, educated French society had become ‘a world from which God had seemingly withdrawn, leaving mankind to its own devices’.18 Even some Italian reformers were disquieted by the extent of so new a concept of the family set at the heart of the law. What might be termed ‘first contact’ between the enlightened intelligentsia of Milan and the dominant salons of late eighteenth-century Paris would not have inspired confidence in Luosi, or his masters, had they paused over the history of their enterprise. Alessandro Verri and Beccaria had recoiled from the irreligion of the French philosophes quite quickly, just as they had considered them too abstract and imprecise to create durable systems of thought.19 Accusations of imprecision resurfaced in abundance in the discussions of the basic structure of the new codes, as has been seen, but now, under Napoleonic rule, philosophical unease moved from the realm of theory, to that of the workings of the law, and the fate of society. Once the discussions for the new Civil Code were underway, and long after its promulgation, a new generation of Italian professionals and intellectuals, many of whom regarded themselves as committed reformers, felt that the French template was simply incongruous to Italian circumstances in its most fundamental concepts of the place of the individual within the family. Such reservations carried a sense that the Code Napoleon was too secular in its ethos for Italian society. The conflict of theory and reality had already emerged, at the very fulcrum of the Italian Enlightenment. In his Of Crime and Punishments, Beccaria had famously asserted the incompatibility of the ancien re´gime concept of the family with personal liberty: Let us imagine a hundred thousand men, or twenty thousand families, each one made up of five individuals including the

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representative head of the family; if union in society is reckoned by families, this will give us twenty thousand men, and eighty thousand slaves; if it be reckoned by men, we shall have a hundred thousand, and not a single slave.20 Beccaria retreated from this radical stance after his direct experience of the Parisian salon’s atheism, but the individualism he espoused in this regard was enshrined in the Code Napoleon, and extended to women, as well as men, certainly in so far as rights of inheritance were concerned. In the context of what they found in the territories of the Kingdom of Italy, this pitted the French directly against the vestiges of Roman law that governed the control of parents over their children after the age of majority, principally through the terms of laws of inheritance. When he wrote his influential tract, Beccaria was sure that the culprit in fostering injustice within the family was less the Church than the Roman law tradition. Luosi and the French continued to agree with him, long after he had changed his own mind. The official preliminary remarks to the first report of the committee for the framing of the Italian Civil Code in 1804 went so far as to castigate the Roman law tradition of family law as framed for purposes of a primitive nobility trying to protect its privileges, for ‘its family laws are repugnant to natural sensibilities; they are tyrannical. Their contract laws are too simplistic, and were made for a barbarous people’.21 The committee went further: The civil authority was cruel and unworthy in its approach to domestic relations, in which it always espoused a certain arrogant family spirit, which is repellent to natural good political sense. Within the family, relationships were rude, and too simplistic, as they would be among a barbarous people . . . whose habits were terrible, iniquitous and oppressive.22 The tone became less strident by the time the Code came into force in 1806, but the principles which drove this outburst had not yielded to Roman tradition. Luosi was hardly unaware of the opposition the Code Napoleon’s concept of family law would encounter. Even when the committee was at the earliest stage of simply translating the Code Napoleon into Italian, the incongruity of its regulation of inheritance,

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and thus of relations between fathers and their children, was being cited by the Italian jurists concerned, as a field of potential conflict. Luosi pointed this out to Eugene without nuance: In the course of this work, the discussion . . . arose about the regulations which curtailed the ability of fathers within very tight limits than those established by Roman law, which have, until now, been adopted among us; the community of property between spouses inferred simply by a legal act was also discussed; (as was also) the age of majority; (and) . . . other clauses which the mores of people accustomed to different forms of social organisation seem to require modification. However committed to the philosophy that underpinned the Code Napoleon, Luosi had his doubts that the Kingdom was ready for it. The following passage is crossed out in the draft manuscript of the letter, perhaps because Luosi did not want Eugene to know the depths of his pessimism: ‘It is only by experience, and over time that laws are put to the test, that the usefulness of modifications or their necessity, are appreciated.’23 This suppressed comment sought a gradualism French imperialism would never admit, even if, as Luosi’s phrasing indicated, what was asked was a gradual amendment to the original template over time, rather than a permanent change to it. Opposition could be all the more pointed because those who were concerned by this clash of cultures usually admitted the need and possessed the desire, to reform ancien re´gime legislation. In June, 1805, the commission for the framing of the Civil Code sent a collection of letters and memorandums it had received from magistrates on the lower courts to Luosi, most of them abstracted and without ascribed provenance, which nonetheless left the opinions of their authors quite clear. One such praised many aspects of the project, particularly the clarity of the Code Napoleon when it came to protecting the rights of the small landholding peasantry, and he welcomed the arrival of a code that could be easily interpreted by laymen. He had faith that almost all its clauses on property transactions could work well in Italy. The author pointed out the incompatibility of divorce with the establishment of Roman Catholicism as the state religion, and with Italian mores, but he did not express hostility to it, per se, because it had precedents in Roman law.

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Here, he revealed a set of positive assumptions about the new code for the Kingdom that would be dashed, once it was published: the Code Napoleon would work as long as it conformed to Roman law, which he felt it did, and so, in Italian hands, it would become a rationalised version of the Justinian Code; its strictures on the age of majority for sons would have to be changed from 18 to 25, to conform to Italian customs, and if paternal control over sons was extended this far, including after their marriages, the new code would give fathers even more control over their sons than at present. The equal division of property among all children might work for sons, but the inclusion of daughters was unthinkable, so far was it removed from Roman practice.24 This was a sign that those committed to reform had their limits, but also that many could not imagine either the inflexibility of the French, or the magnitude of the changes that awaited them. As early as 1803, De Simoni, who was the chairman of the first commission to create a civil code even before the completion of the Code Napoleon, had warned that it was exactly in this area of the law that the commission – and the magistrates who would have to make it work – would have to be most alert to ‘backsliding’ into ancien re´gime habits. Some, he knew, would make conscious attempts to thwart the impact of the new legislation, but just as prevalent would be problems arising for the attitude revealed by the anonymous provincial magistrate, above: an incomprehension among those who regarded themselves as progressive, to absorb so fundamental a break with the Roman tradition in their intimate lives. They would attempt to adapt the new code to the Justinian tradition in their rulings on particular cases. De Simoni argued this would strike at the very constitution of the Kingdom, for however much many magistrates and the public as a whole may regard these matters as purely private, they were no longer; the Code was clear on these things, and there could be but one, inalterable law for the whole kingdom. However, De Simoni did not believe any new code would work which did not adopt the maxims of the Justinian Code in matters of family law. He spent a great deal of time asserting their compatibility – with significant reform – to the political constitution of the Republic.25 In his initial work on the code, De Simoni emerged as a staunch opponent of the traditional rights of fathers to control their sons’ property after the age of majority, yet his own proposals retained an element of this, where property had come to sons

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through the family. De Simoni drew a distinction between this kind of property, in which the family held an interest, and anything sons had acquired independently of their fathers. He was not sanguine about an equal division of property that included daughters, in Italian social conditions. The ethos of that Code and the Constitution was civil equality, and to allow Justinian traditions in family law to persist, was not a threat to either: Consequently, if Justinian law is adopted . . . for rendering justice among private individuals, and retained in spirit, and so forms the fundamental principles of the constitution of this Republic, there will not be a danger of bringing back to life the laws of fidecommessi, of primogenitor and, above all, those (laws) which favoured despotism and fostered the prejudices of aristocratic oligarchy because these laws are directly repugnant to the spirit and the fundamental principles of the constitution of the republic.26 De Simoni failed in this attempt, and these elements of his project were not adopted. His defence of Roman family law was not couched in reactionary terms, and he was at pains to display his republican credentials in many other respects, but his way was blocked by Napoleon’s fiat. However, De Simoni did not argue his case from ignorance; his grasp of the French Code was so faultless that he became a member both of the French Cour de Cassation and the Institut, the highest accolade of judicial learning in the French system.27 De Simoni sought an Italian solution to Italian needs, and he did not shirk from the opprobrium of the Church in defending civil marriage, or that of the localities in his assertion of the need for the Code to supercede all other legislation. Rather, he felt that only by retaining Justinian law in certain sensitive areas of legislation, could the new code hope to work in northern Italy. Roman law had to remain, even if in a subsidiary role. Bridges had to be built, and could be, in his thinking, between Roman and French law. Others did not make such connections, but they saw these aspects of the Code Napoleon as a destabilising influence on society. Freedom of the individual was at the heart of the thinking of the eighteenth-century reformers of northern Italy, or so they thought until they encountered the Parisian salon in tooth-and-claw. Beccaria, himself, dated his

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conversion to ‘the cause of humanity’ from his father’s refusal to allow him to marry an ‘unsuitable’ girl; the Verri brothers, too, had quarrelled with their father in such a spirit, if over political, rather than personal issues.28 ‘Fathers and sons’ stood at the heart of Roman laws of marriage and inheritance, and the reform of this aspect of social relations offered by the Code Napoleon was a direct breach of Italian tradition, a blow at the heart of Roman law, and a window on a world where the will of the individual was set above that of the family as a collective. People at every level of society saw this. Luosi had to admit that many of them loathed it, and sought to bypass the new freedom of sons and daughters who had passed the age of majority for marriage, to wed without parental permission, not least because the Code also conferred on them freedom to own and use property as they saw fit, independent of the family. Provincial officials simply refused to comply, in the registry office. In April 1806, Luosi reported to Eugene: ‘[Under traditional practice] children having attained the age of majority . . . are obliged, before contracting a marriage, to ask for a formal act of agreement from their mother and father. No age limit dispenses this formality’. This is now being applied to civil marriages, which the Code insists on. Not only was this illegal under the Code, the need for documentary proof demanded by the civil authorities was all but impossible in many cases where even two of the parents are dead. This introduction of Roman tradition into the new civil marriage was causing tangible chaos but, Luosi added, it was essential to assert that this need for parental permission is now unnecessary. His solution was to introduce the emphatic terms of the French legislation into the new code to clarify this, yet the deeper connotations of his expose´ was that social norms simply deterred local officials from breaking with so fundamental a part of their concept of social relationships.29 De Simoni stood in the intellectual tradition of Alessandro Verri, who sought to rescue Roman law from centuries of wilful misinterpretation, warped by a corrupt ancien re´gime.30 The French did not see Roman law this way, nor did some of his colleagues. It was left to Luosi to fight Roman law in the civil sphere. As a Modenese, he was of a more authoritarian stamp than De Simoni for Luosi was from a Duchy which had seen determined assaults on feudal and clerical privilege in the late ancien re´gime.31 This made him readier to accept Napoleonic solutions than those of Il Caffe`, and made him a

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determined opponent of the Church and any legal traditions that had the faintest whiff of aristocratic privilege about them. This embraced family law. In Luosi’s hands, the rhetoric became less stridently republican and anti-aristocratic, but the fear did not abate that Roman family law was the backdoor to an aristocratic attack on the principle of equality before the law, and an assault on the concept of the unified state. When Luosi told Eugene that the Justinian Code was ‘only a mass of ill-considered partial decisions, (that) it has been a tortuous labyrinth to this day,’ he added that it had always been put to nefarious political ends by the old regime.32 The fight raged in the details, as much as in philosophical principle. Divorce was a point over which Napoleon always proved inflexible, well before he, himself, divorced in 1810. The arguments over divorce reveal the inherent belief among Italian magistrates that the role of environment, more than the application of universalist principles, would prevail, even if they admitted as much with some reluctance. Italian jurists almost never lectured the French about Catholic morality, or pleaded personal bad conscience about opposing it: divorce had been sanctioned under Roman law. Rather, their remarks reflected those of the anonymous magistrate quoted above, that it was both at odds with the constitution Napoleon, himself, had given the Kingdom, and would simply not be popular with the public. Within the committee, Pellegati set out views of this kind in 1802, and he did so, significantly, in the context of adultery. Like many reformers, and in common with the French, Pellegati detected a degeneration in the morals of the Italian elites, and believed that the only proper way to punish adultery was through divorce, but divorce with draconian penalties attached for male transgressors, which included the restoration of dowries to their wives, and a freely granted divorce to his wife, together with the confiscation of half of his property to support her; should he flee, perpetual banishment and the loss of all his assets was appropriate. His colleague, Ritori, considered adultery a form of theft, and should be punished as such. There was little sense of a desire to defend the cause of Catholic morality in these discussions, or subsequent ones throughout 1802–6. However, there are two very revealing points that arise from them. Adultery was accepted as the main source of divorces, but Pellegati set it in what he saw as the realistic social context of his society: ‘the adulterous wife would no longer feel constrained to bury her own faults

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in silence . . . spouses would remain free to (commit adultery) but would simply be more circumspect in their conduct’. Ritori pointed out that Justinian had curbed the ferocious penalties laid down by Octavian and Constantine, simply because they had not worked. The collective view of adultery was that it was a danger to society, but an eradicable one. Their second observation brought to the fore their concept of society itself. Ritori argued that there were differences in adulterous relationships; those which involved two people simply seeking pleasure were very different, and less serious, than liaisons which aimed to destroy marriages, sunder families and, above all, involved the loss of property by abandoned wives and children. The latter form of adultery struck at the collective well-being of the family, at the heart of society, and thus constituted a real danger to social stability. This, rather than the question of individual morality, was the reason adultery and divorce had to be taken seriously by the law.33 The family stood at the heart of everything, and here they parted company with the original thoughts of Beccaria and French policy, even when defending one of the most unpopular elements of the new code. Justinian, not Napoleon nor even Beccaria, had got it right for Italian circumstances. The family, and its preservation, was where civil and criminal law overlapped for Pellegati and Ritori. The same priorities emerged over sentencing in criminal matters where fines or punishments affecting the conduct of business were concerned. This emerged in 1806 when, following a comprehensive consultation with the Courts of Appeal of the Kingdom after complaints received from them, real concerns emerged about the over use of the suspension or interdiction of a business or exercise of a trade for malpractice. French norms, now in use, were too harsh, because businesses were family affairs, not just the concern of the guilty individual. No suspension of trade should be imposed before someone had been found guilty. However essential for public confidence in the law to protect it from malpractice, the courts were concerned about how this kind of penalty can hurt an entire family, and deprive them of the very means of survival: To wish to avoid such consequences, would be . . . imperil the conservation of society. It is harsh for the family which is subject to the suspension of an art or craft, sees itself deprived of the means of

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subsistence. This does not happen every time, yet it is frequent enough that where there are arrests and long trials that end in fines, and how does the family dependent on the labour of the accused sustain itself? Would the prevention of transgressions be better, if the natural love of family did not drive people to break the law from greed in the exercise of their profession? If suspensions continued to be imposed at the moment of accusation, the collective view of the Italian magistrate was that no further penalties should be imposed, in the collective interest of the family, unless the offence was very serious.34 The most senior courts of the Kingdom still put the most traditional collective, the family, foremost in their thoughts, rather than the individual, who stood at the heart of the Code they were meant to interpret. The introduction of the new Civil Code entailed the brusque expulsion of the Church from all control of family law. For the majority of Italians, the absence of clerical participation in marriage or the making of wills was simply regarded as suspect. Now, under the Code, as the Ligurian legal thinker Ambrogio Laberio put it, ‘the state, and the quality of citizenship, and the family, depended totally on civil law’.35 This swift, inflexible change had immediate and widespread social ramifications. The absence of tension over the disappearance of the Church from family law in the discussions of the legal elite of the Republic and Kingdom of Italy is remarkable. That they did not contest the introduction of divorce signifies the degree of their secularisation in such matters. However, they found it much harder to accept the relegation of Roman law from an active agent of social regulation to a theoretical influence over the new codes. Roman law had thought and worked in the collective interests of the family, through its paternal head. If their attitude to this had been much nuanced by enlightenment influences, the senior magistrates still felt that the family, not the individual, was the cornerstone of their particular society, and turned to two related currents of conservative enlightened thought to explain their differences from the French. They defended themselves in terms of Montesquieu’s assertion of the primacy of environmental influences on the development of society, and through the view of history, most associated with Jovellanos, that social realities are reflected by and in the laws a people give themselves, that:

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the roots of the new law . . . would collapse if not based on the past, and that their real norms had to be localised, exhumed and deduced from the spirit of the country, itself, in the spirit of new times, and for new objectives.36 Roman law, in northern Italy, at least, had stood the test of time, and had been adapted and refined to suit society, at least in matters of family law. To discard it courted chaos. Canon law, on the other hand, reflected neither environment, nor history; it had been imposed on all of Europe, and made no concessions to particularities; thus, it reflected neither environment, nor history. Unlike the French or, ironically, the Church, the togati argued the case for no one but themselves. In so doing, they overturned the universalism of the enlightenment according to the French Revolution.

The Napoleonic Code of Criminal Justice and the Kingdom of Italy: Institutionalising a crisis? Few aspects of Napoleonic legal reform raised as many anxieties among northern Italian magistrates as the prospect of the wholesale introduction of the Napoleonic criminal code – the Code Penal – into their midst. The code was not actually completed and published within the French Empire until 1810, but the work for it and, hence, the parallel work for a code for the Kingdom of Italy, began in earnest in 1807. By this time, the relationship between the two states had become much tighter than in the period during the work for the Civil Code and the Civil Code of Procedure, before 1806, and the expectation in Paris was that its new criminal code would be a clone of the French model. This raised opposition from a wide spectrum of the Italian judiciary, thus exposing starkly the different intellectual traditions of an Italian intelligentsia deeply rooted in a Humanism recently invigorated by the thinking of Beccaria, and a French regime which Italians saw as hardening into a security state. The discussions among Italian magistrates over the period 1807 –11, when the Kingdom’s criminal code came into force, took place against a background of major threats to its internal stability from large-scale revolts within both its own borders, and in the neighbouring, newly annexed imperial departments in Tuscany and Parma-Piacenza. The high

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valleys of the Piacentino, in Parma-Piacenza, which became the department of the Taro, were the theatre of a short-lived revolt in the winter of 1805– 6, on the eve of their annexation to France; although quickly suppressed, the rising found strong popular support, with rebel numbers estimated into five figures in a thinly populated area. The Tuscan regions of the Aretino and the valleys above Pistoia saw large revolts in 1808, again on the eve of annexation, all of which caused unease across the border in Milan. However, the major traumas for those responsible for the government of the Kingdom came in 1809, in two huge, if largely unrelated waves. The first was centred in the northeast, in former Venetian territory, around Trento and the Alto-Adige, which began as a component of Hofer’s Tyrolean revolt against Bavarian rule, and was a product of the Franco-Austrian war of 1809. However, as the rebels pushed into the Po valley, they found significant support in the urban centres of the pianura. This expansion of the revolt into open country made it easier to suppress militarily, but it revealed how unstable the very core of the Kingdom might become if the prospect of external invasion became possible, even by peasant militias. Later in 1809, a quite independent revolt broke out in the high Apennine valleys of what is now the province of Emilia-Romagna. It soon enveloped the lowlands and their cities, such as Ravenna and Forlı`, even threatening the largest urban centre of the region, Bologna. The revolt had been ignited by increased taxation to pay for the 1809 war, and the rebels’ ranks were swollen by deserters and refractory conscripts. That it was not incited by foreign intervention, and took place without any prospect of external support, made it all the more disquieting for the regime. It was a brutal revelation of how the countryside really felt about the Napoleonic government; that it was largely apolitical and leaderless above the most localised level was, perhaps, all the more terrifying for those who had to live with and administer these populations.37 Quite apart from these major revolts, the territories of the Kingdom were plagued by low-level but widespread banditry and other forms of violent crime which remained the backdrop against which any discussion of criminal law had to take place, although criminal offences were gradually abating in these years thanks to the efforts of a well-trained and organised gendarmerie under French command. The years before 1809 had been fraught, but the problem of law and order had been seen, in the main, as the legacy of the dislocation of the

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wars of the late 1790s, and the peasant revolts which followed in their wake, all compounded by decades of weak pre-Napoleonic government that were being contained and gradually reversed under the new regime,38 the increasing demands of conscription and their inherent tensions notwithstanding. In these circumstances, most magistrates of the civil and even criminal courts of the Republic/Kingdom had accepted as necessary the exceptional measures Napoleon imposed as regarded criminal justice. Just as in France, military commissions with extensive powers – those of life and death, in essence – covered large parts of the state; they were composed mainly of soldiers and could behave ruthlessly. The criminal courts, too, as in the empire, were partially composed of soldiers – usually officers of the gendarmerie – and the institution of the jury was not extended to Italy, because of the convulsed state of public order, more than for reasons of continuing political tension. All this had been acknowledged as necessitated by circumstances that would, in time, recede. The Italian magistracy in the main seems to have regarded these measures as extraordinary and exceptional. They would not, and should not, influence the workings of any new criminal code they might frame, or the proceedings of criminal cases of a nonexceptional nature that might come before civilian magistrates. The years 1800–9 bore the marks of a prolonged state-of-emergency that would pass, however slowly in some parts of the state. As early as 1802, senior magistrates agreed that highway robbery and other forms of banditry, particularly raids by armed bands on isolated farms – cascine – had reached such levels that the death penalty and military justice were still necessary for the restoration of order. Even in such difficult times, however, voices were raised that collective peasant rebellion was a different problem. A current of thought on the commission pointed to the fact that the military commissions themselves had often concluded that there were very few homicides or other serious offences committed as a result of collective armed resistance. This was coupled with a feeling that it was counter-productive to apply severe punishments to a mass of easily led, ignorant people. There were disagreements about the degrees of leniency to be shown participants in collective rebellions, but even Rougier, the Frenchman on the commission, agreed that the general purpose of a new criminal code had to assume the normalisation of society, and avoid institutionalising exceptional punitive justice.39

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Later, in 1806, during discussions for the creation of a criminal code for the Kingdom, the commission charged with this task expressed a very clear intention to return to an approach to sentencing that did not treat an attempt at violent rising with the same severity as a consummated revolt, where loss of life and damage to property had occurred. The commission made it very clear that the death penalty and the possible confiscation of property should be applied only very sparingly, and that those peasants in arms who surrendered without resistance or were apprehended in the vicinity of any altercation, but were not engaged in violence, should be dealt with leniently.40 The whole tenor of the commission’s views on how to deal with peasant rebellion in 1806 stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing ethos in the Napoleonic state, of swift, ruthless, quasi-military justice. Although there was no real criticism of this approach in the context of the times, the commission made it clear that the harshness of martial law had no place in any permanent legal code, even where armed, collective resistance took place. Although it was never specifically referred to in the course of the report, the commission probably considered such collective violence as the result of the application of conscription. This was a reality they knew would not change, and thus, they could not countenance extraordinary measures being used against it, for this would pervert the law. However, the revolts of 1809 had shaken the confidence that law and order would be restored. The fear now was that the Kingdom was a state under siege from its own rural masses, that the progress of the last decade had been only an illusion. Nevertheless, the response of many Italian magistrates, when consulted about the nature of the new criminal code, stands in sharp contrast to that of their counterparts in local government, who withdrew into an authoritarian pessimism in the wake of the trauma of 1809.41 Their responses to the requests of the central government for their views on the projected code did not change after 1809. The reactions of a significant number of Italian magistrates, from the senior Court of Appeal in Milan to the provincial tribunals, reveal a remarkable similarity of purpose and a strongly held belief in the liberal ideas of Beccaria, alongside an unshakeable adherence to the Humanist traditions they were imbued with, in the face of growing – rather than diminishing – unrest. This set them at odds with the expectation of ever-closer adherence to French norms, by the government in Milan as well as Paris.

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Their over-riding fear was that the genuine state of emergency would harden into a permanently draconian system of criminal law, enshrined in the code that was under discussion in the aftermath of the 1809 revolts, a set of circumstances that would allow the French model to implant itself in Italy unless opposed. Although not wholly intransigent in their objections to the French Criminal Code, or holistic in their rejection of its precepts, the uniformity of those objections they did raise is striking, given the diverse legal traditions the magistrates themselves had emerged from: theirs was a reforming agenda, acquired in the last years of the old order, and unshaken by the years of emergency and unrest. This appeared to be their last chance to forward their vision, and to defend its merits, even if their hopes of success were negligible. From the outset, there was unanimous agreement throughout the legal profession that a single criminal code for the entire country was desirable, just as there was an equally general feeling that the French approach to codification was too vague and imprecise to work in Italian circumstances, a view shared even by Luosi, in 1806.42 The Italian magistracy, for all its internal differences, spoke as one against the French ethos of severity. Even more than in civil cases, Italian magistrates stressed the need to preserve a significant latitude for judges in sentencing criminal offences. One provincial magistrate even took the trouble to research two cases from French courts where too rigid an interpretation of the law – before the formulation of the code, but working in its ethos – had led to serious miscarriages of justice.43 The tenacity of Italian magistrates during the debates of 1810 in their loyalty to their own vision of reform was not marked by any reactionary desire to return to an ancien re´gime past.44 The recurring concern about the need not to lose judicial discretion in sentencing was generally made in the context of avoiding excessive severity. This perpetual challenge to the French model was, on the face of it, a defence of ancien re´gime, pre-codification realities, yet it was made not in the spirit of the defence of privilege or of local legal custom, but of Beccarian enlightenment. The Beccarian cast of mind of the Italian magistrates emerges most sharply in response to specific aspects of French legislation, and does so consistently over the period of Napoleonic rule. These objections stretched beyond issues of law and order, as such, into areas of the criminal law that show how very different the moral compass of Italians

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could be from that of the Napoleonic state. In 1803, several members of the first commission for reform of the criminal law argued that the harsh French attitude towards infanticide was too divorced from complex social realities, and lacked compassion – a clear case, they added, for the need to retain extensive judicial discretion.45 In 1810, the commission for the criminal code defended its opposition to the French practice of condemning people frequently to life sentences, even for serious offences, because it undermined the concept of rehabilitation, ‘a measure established to win back public confidence, and through which the rights (of the criminal), which have been lost because of his offence, exist, notwithstanding the infliction of the punishment’.46 The timing of this assertion is significant, coming as it did in the wake of the revolts of 1809 and the attendant plethora of condemnations to death in absentia handed out by the military commissions established specifically to deal with the rebels.47 Their continuing reservations about the excessive use of the death penalty revealed the Italian magistrates’ desire to preserve the essence of Beccarian precepts, even if they were aware that the ideal of its abolition – which had been realised under Peter-Leopold in Tuscany in the 1780s until reversed after annexation to France in 1809 – was as impossible as it was impracticable. In March 1803, when public order was still generally regarded as in a state of emergency, a very senior magistrate and member of the commission, Pellegati, invoked Beccaria directly, insisting that the death penalty should be applied only in cases where the whole of society was under threat, and was concerned by how far the current project had extended its application. His concern was that emergency measures were in danger of becoming the norm.48 In 1806, Luosi took a much harder line on this than many of his colleagues, but was careful to couch his defence of a wider application of capital punishment in terms of the current state of disorder. Bracketing the confiscation of property together with execution as ‘the two maximum punishments possible’, he asserted that their existence ‘should certainly not be regarded as out of proportion, considering the gravity of these crimes (banditry and armed rebellion), whose very nature strikes at the life of society’.49 Luosi was careful to be very prescriptive about where severity was needed; even in moments when armed bands were actually raised in rebellion, the death penalty, deportation and the confiscation of property should not be applied when the revolts had come to nothing:

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The law would fail in its duty, if it did not distinguish between those who took a direct part in a group which did direct harm, and those arrested where a seditious gathering had taken place, though found without arms, and (the law) must oppose inflicting the same punishment on them.50 Luosi’s words are worth noting in detail, as he had been appointed to his post in 1806 specifically because he was regarded by Paris as a magistrate whose views corresponded closely with those of the French.51 The determination of Italian magistrates to curb the severity of the French model emerges at its most profound in Luosi’s response to the first minister of the Kingdom, Aldini, in 1810, when he explained why the French code could not be followed to the letter over the use of capital punishment in Italy: The progress of civilisation, the study of human nature, of the principles of social institutions and their interaction, do not permit penal sanctions to be regarded as expressions of public vendetta. This outlook only shows the authorities as weak: punishment is not vendetta, and vendetta should not enter, in any manner, into the reasoning of the law.52 The timing – in the wake of 1809 – and the author – Luosi – underscore the degree of opposition to the wholesale imposition of the French model over the most serious of offences. Luosi raised the debate to the level of philosophy, and in so doing laid down an unambiguous challenge, however carefully and delicately phrased, as to who was truly following in the path of enlightened progress. In his conclusion to Aldini, a summing up of the commission’s opinion on the death penalty, Luosi cited Bentham – an avowed admirer of Beccaria53 – in their support, although he did not quote him directly. His own words were emphatic enough. Speaking for his colleagues, Luosi said that although some philosophes reject the death penalty as illegitimate and unnecessary, the commission admitted that this was impractical. It did not fit the needs of society as it existed ‘in this age of light’, and it was not the place of the legislator to work in terms of perfection, but to deal with circumstances as he found them. Nevertheless, given that the death penalty is the highest form of

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punishment, Luosi insisted that it must only be applied to the highest forms of delinquency, and only those recognised by society as such: ‘At the same time, the irreparable effect this punishment can produce must be considered.’ Evidence, the commission reminded their political masters through Luosi, is never concrete; there is always room for error, ‘for which nothing on earth can compensate’.54 The French knew all too well that the Italian magistrates opposed their template for the criminal law. When Aldini passed on the first draft of the work of Luosi’s commission to Napoleon in April, 1810, he warned his master that: the compilers of the project, in spite of having been aware of the need for following all the principal and most important points of the maxims and dispositions of the French Code have, rather, found it convenient to dispense with some parts of this uniformity.55 Aldini couched their opposition in terms of wanting to protect ancien re´gime norms, based on a collective belief that the wholesale introduction of the French Penal Code of 1810 would not work in harmony with ‘the deformed ancient institutions’ of the country. This was blatantly untrue. At the same moment, Napoleon’s viceroy in Milan, Eugene de Beauharnais, pointed out to Napoleon that it would be wise to accept most of the commission’s recommendations – centred mainly on capital punishment, political crimes and public order in general – because to introduce the French Code wholesale would destabilise many of the measures Napoleon had taken over these issues in Italy, over the previous decade. If this were perceived to be the case, the magistrates might – and already did – sense a return to ancien re´gime practice.56 Perhaps less fearful for his position with Napoleon than Aldini, Eugene caught the essence of the commission’s fears. He left it only half-said, but Eugene acknowledged the commitment of Luosi’s commission to enlightened reform; he also left unsaid that they had challenged the monopoly of Revolutionary-Napoleonic France to the right to claim the right to set itself up as the highest oracle of enlightened progress. The agency of imperialism had shown how opposed to each other they could be, when it was a matter of life and death, even in a crisis.

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There was one aspect of the new Penal Code where Italian magistrates lobbied strongly for an approach to sentencing that, prima facia, appeared harsher than the French template: the age of majority for culpability. Many of their arguments inevitably led them away from the underlying principle of universalism that underpinned the Code Napoleon, and to a reliance on the tenets of Montesquieu, and a more conservative enlightenment, rather to an outright wish to return to the old order, as such. This arose as early as 1802, amidst the ranks of the senior magistrates on the first commission for framing a code. The issue, itself, is perhaps less important in the wider context of compiling new law codes, than in how it was argued. Roman law set the age of majority at 7; the Code Napoleon and the Code of Joseph II for the Habsburg lands, compiled in the 1780s, placed it at 12. In 1802, two members of the commission, Negri and Pellegati, argued for the retention of the Roman precedent, Negri – flatly – because it ran with the thinking of mainstream Italian jurisprudence. Pellegati, in contrast, deployed crypto-Montesquieuian environmentalism to argue a conservative case. Pellegati looked to daily experience, and the full knowledge it provides of the nation concerned, (through which) I can trace a few principles, which might give some direction . . . The Josephine Code might be suited to the phlegmatic inhabitants of the north for which it was made; but when speaking of our own Italy, it is certain that the temperate and favourable climate of this beautiful part of Europe accelerates the development of our senses, and thus, of our intellectual faculties, to the point that it is certain that a boy of 12 is capable of guilt, and of doing harm knowingly, because he is capable of reason at an earlier age; the proof is the immense (quantity) of thieves on our streets, and in our prisons, and that those of ten years’ old or even younger, are already long-standing masters of crime.57 It was a very rare instance of Italian jurists holding out for principles harsher than those set out by the French, but they stood by them. Negri’s blunt conservatism was rare, but even he spoke from hard empirical experience, rather than blind reverence for Roman law. Pellegati, however, challenged one shade of enlightenment with another, but in

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doing so, he refuted the basic tenet which underpinned French justification for extending the reforms of the Revolution – those of the Consulate, included – wherever they held sway. Pellegati raised the spectre, in contemporary scientific terms, that Condorcet, following Cicero, was not always right that ‘a good law was a good law’ for all mankind. Instead, he turned to relativism based on climate-engendered environmental realities. From here, it was implicitly argued, that Roman law was the sum of Italian empirical experience, and this suited its society simply because it had survived in Italy over centuries, at least in the case of the most basic, human aspects of justice. When the subject arose again, in 1806, their arguments were couched less in the abstract, but on the need for more flexibility than the Code Napoleon allowed. The committee for the compilation of the new Civil Code in 1806 still felt that 7, as in Roman law, was the right age, but agreed it should be fixed at 9, as a compromise with the French insistence on 12, and cited the support for this of six senior magistrates and all the provincial tribunals. Their experience of offences in their own country, as well as the quality of evidence children were capable of presenting in court, had convinced them that an intermediate level, of 9 to 15, should be created for punishments, and a clear division made between less serious ‘correctional offences’, and true criminal cases. Above all, judges needed to be given wider discretion in sentencing, or the hearing of evidence in civil cases, than the French system allowed.58 This was not a reactionary rearguard action, pure and simple, but a series of sustained, if shifting, arguments that drew on conservative but enlightened precepts, to support Italian diversity. It might also be interpreted as an instance of the French making some progress in winning over Italian legal opinion, when the cause of leniency was tilted in their favour, but only possibly. The Italian approach to the age of majority, a relatively minor issue in itself, is perhaps the most striking illustration of a collective view that there was more than one path to enlightened reform. The survival of a lower age of majority over centuries reflected its intrinsic relevance to that same society. Equally, however, it had to be tempered by flexible sentencing, based on judicial discretion. Their arguments for this fairly minor matter reveal their cast of mind with real clarity: Roman law, where it survived, merited respect as an active agent in the law, yet it had to be administered according to an experience tempered by modern concepts of humanity. The crisis of

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juvenile crime, no more or less than those of brigandage and rebellion, should be dealt with according to this blend of influences. The reactions of Italian magistrates to French insistence on the retention of a more severe approach to criminal justice bears the outward marks of a trend often detected in the exercise of exceptional justice in convulsed, specifically imperial circumstances that the American legal historian Lauren Benton describes as a process ‘in which the exception becomes ever more closely identified with the rule’.59 The example of the responses of the magistrates of the Italian kingdom to the French Criminal and Penal Codes points to an attempt to stem this approach to lawmaking in an imperial context. It represents less an attempt to prevent ‘the bleeding of exceptionalism into dominant political structures’,60 than a direct clash of two opposing legal traditions which pre-dated the imperial relationship. Italian magistrates had accepted the exceptional justice introduced by the French, in French form, during the initial emergency following the imposition of imperial rule, and again during the second phase of collective revolt in 1809. However, their opposition to the French Criminal Code as basis for their own legislation, in terms of sentencing above all, stemmed less from a fear of ‘bleeding exceptionalism’, than resistance to the institutionalisation of inappropriate norms from a foreign legal culture.

The Codes of Procedure: Life under the new regime The discussions among Italian magistrates on the codification of the law, civil and criminal, proceeded from a consensus that it was essential to forge a single, uniform code for the entire country, however much they might disagree with the French model over detail. In terms of statute law, criminal and civil alike, Italian magistrates found unity in aspiration rather than shared experience. They hoped that the coming of Napoleonic rule would lead to the realisation of their hopes for a more enlightened, coherent system of justice, aspirations which were often disappointed in detail, if just as often fulfilled at the higher levels of theory. If the French codes often seemed too abstract and vague to them, they had, at least, moved into the world of codified law; they had an acceptable framework that could, one day, be reformed. If family law seemed too out of keeping with many Italian mores, it was at least an advance on direct clerical control of this aspect of legislation. If French

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punishments seemed too harsh in terms of the Beccarian concepts they had hoped to see applied to a new criminal code, at least the Napoleonic model was less arbitrary and less vicious than the statutes of the old order, particularly in its greatly reduced application of the dreaded and corrupted use of the sequestration of property.61 The Napoleonic codes were far from ideal, but they were an improvement on ancien re´gime reality. It was not so with the Codes of Procedure, because they definitively sanctioned a system of judicial administration which many Italian magistrates had already learned to dread. In 1802, drawing on the previous guidelines from the triennio, the Italian Republic issued the Metodo Generale, a mixture of French and Austrian procedural practices. It effectively sanctioned the continuation of most ancien re´gime procedural practices in the lower tribunals, although it confirmed the open, public trial as essential.62 It was one thing to argue over statute law, which Italian magistrates could try to avoid or reinterpret in their own lights. It was quite another to function in a wholly new, alien, and often distasteful judicial system, and this is what, in fact, many of them felt happened under Napoleonic rule. When Antonino De Francesco observed that ‘the introduction of the Napoleonic codes carried with them the birth of a new legal world’,63 for contemporary magistrates it meant the daily reality of an entirely new way of holding a trial. When the French imposed their system of procedure on the nonFrench parts of their empire and the satellite kingdoms, this came as a shock – as a true revolution – to many judicial cultures. Perversely, it also showed how much the different judicial traditions of the various components of the Italian state actually had in common with each other, in this respect. Everywhere in the lands that became the Napoleonic satellite state, trials had conformed to the Inquisitorial model, in that hearings were held in camera; witnesses were questioned individually by magistrates, with their respective consuls present, and the transcriptions of their testimonies were confidential to the court. No one was, by training, a public orator; the public was not privy to the details of cases, however meticulously recorded. No one was cross-examined; questioning was the sole prerogative of the judges. At a stroke, all this changed, and it jolted the public and the magistracy alike. The principle of the public trial had been much debated before the arrival of Napoleon but, like so much else Italians now had to work with, it had remained very

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much in the realm of theory. Now, experienced at first hand, a considerable number of senior magistrates and provincial tribunals found it distasteful. The discussions surrounding the new Codes of Procedure gave vent to years of discontent, which began under the Cisalpine Republic and stretched across the whole period from 1800, to the completion of the Code of Civil Procedure in 1807, and its counterpart for the Penal Code in 1811. The arrival of the open, public trial, with its verbal jousting, aggressive system of cross-examination, and verbatim publication of proceedings, marked a more traumatic break with the past than even the most contested aspects of statute law. Italian magistrates criticised the French trial in four ways: one vein of discontent might be best characterised as distaste, and perhaps had more to do with a conservative sense of a social order based on propriety, than with concrete legal objections; it brought out the most conservative instincts in the magistracy, with its sense that the French model of the trial threatened social and moral foundations. The second had affinities with their general distaste for the aggression and harshness of many French norms in the criminal law for, although the issues of procedure and punishment were technically unrelated, they bore the mark of a lack of delicacy, an absence of respect for human frailties and, most serious of all, a belief that the open trial was simply not the best way to reach the truth in a case. The third turned on the role of the entirely new office of the official public prosecutor and his relationship to the judges, and was closely related to their concerns about cross-examination in public, but also about the very independence of the judiciary. The fourth was, quite simply, that magistrates and lawyers, alike, were not trained in public speaking, and found it daunting to perform before the public for, even though juries were never introduced into the Republic/Kingdom, trials were still open to the public. This final set of objections faded with time, as it became clear that the public trial was there to stay, and a new generation of the legal classes simply adapted to it by force majeure, as they did to the terms of the new codes, in general. However, all these forms of objection exposed the truth that the French model, in its actual workings, was a leap into an uncomfortable dark. In the last days of 1806, Luosi wrote a very telling report to the new viceroy, Eugene de Beauharnais, couched in terms that would appeal to his French master, in support of the open, public trial:

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In the days of its greatness, Rome had procedures that were legal, honest and magnanimous. Accusations were public, the debates between accuser and accused, and all the testimonies were public; the defence was solemn and public; solemn and public was the judgement. The Romans understood the clear connection between the principles of government and those of criminal legislation. That is, they grasped the terrible power the right to decide the innocence of a man could have on the lives of men, and the power it could inspire in the political order . . . The arbitrary administration of a vacillating, suspicious government, that of Rome at the time of the Caesars, saw the system of procedure and the form of judgements change . . . a civilized people was constrained to live under the vile and horrendous norms of secret denunciation, of inquisitions, of torture, and its finest citizens became victims of these cruel innovations. Luosi went on to paint a long, tragic history of this ‘justice’ as the papacy continued these practices, even if it softened the cruelty of its punishments and gradually rid it of the superstitious elements of trial by combat the Goths brought with them over the Alps. Although the Leopoldine reforms in Tuscany did much for statute law, they had not changed the conduct of trials, which were still inquisitorial; only the Napoleonic Civil Code had broken with this insidious tradition. Luosi went on to declare that the introduction of the public trial ‘had to bring about the moral regeneration of Italians’. This had now been realised for the civil law, but it was all the more essential in the criminal law.64 Luosi believed deeply in the importance of the public trial, and defended it consistently to his Italian colleagues, but his discourse was attuned to French ears in this report and, inadvertently, perhaps, he threw down a gauntlet to the Milanese enlightenment. Luosi had to admit that the only precedents for the public trial were in the remote Italian past and therefore, effectively, it was an alien innovation that overturned centuries of experience. He also had to confess that it ran utterly against the grain of all known legal practice, and amounted to a repudiation not just of the foreign rule of Austria in Lombardy, or the obscurantism of the papacy in the Marches, but of the legal traditions of his own Duchy of Modena, to say nothing of the practices of the Republic of St Mark. This was, indeed, a revolution, and Luosi did not

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try to hide it, but it was also an imported revolution. The Italian legal classes rejoiced at the abolition of torture by Napoleon, just as they shared French concerns to end the culture of denunciation, engendered by inquisitorial practices.65 However, to assert that wholesale reform based on foreign norms was the only way to modernise and liberalise Italian justice was quite different. Napoleonic imperialists wallowed in their adaptation of the revolutionary vision of ‘regenerated man’,66 of a civic order remade by good laws and institutions, by ‘transparency’ which the public trial incarnated. It marked the return of republican virtue. However, to assert that Italy could only be reborn by French means was to court resentment, particularly among Italians who had found their own path to enlightenment. Many of the deepest concerns about the new French procedures can actually be deduced from the arguments of determined advocates of the open, public trial, like Luosi. The objections to the French model of the trial were about fundamentals of procedure, not questions of degree, unlike the arguments over statute law. A long commentary by a French jurist, probably written in 1803– 4, made it very clear that the Italian commission should model its new code of procedure directly on that being drawn up simultaneously in France.67 The French inspector saw clearly that there was a fundamental difference between what was central to each system of procedure. Common to all northern Italian court procedures was the primacy of written evidence over oral discussion: it was what was deduced from debate and oral testimony, and then committed to paper that became evidence and the basis for judgements. This had to change: For let there be no mistake. It is in the hearing (open court) that the case must be fully developed. The transcripts, written up later, are only there to indicate to the parties-at-law how they argued against each other, in order to know what went on in the hearing. However, it is not necessary for these written transcripts to deal with the fundamentals of the case. That is the point of the hearing.68 This amounted to a challenge to the very nature of what constituted admissible evidence, and it was not easily accepted by Italian magistrates. The same report bemoaned both the continued adherence

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of Italians to punctilious written accounts of proceedings, which stymied the hoped of French reformers to speed up the dispensation of justice, and forced Italians to do their work collectively, orally, and in public. The latter problem, according to the French observer, was compounded by the seeming inability of Italian magistrates to organise their public discussions: some of them spoke interminably; at other times, they simply took it in turns to make points, with no sense of a debate, of an exchange of views. Italian jurists complained frequently about the lack of precision in the Napoleonic codes, but the French turned the tables on them over the matter of oral debate. However, for Italians, debates and inquiries into the workings of the courts could provoke questioning of the role of the magistracy, itself, as in 1803, when a commission created to discuss a new penal code made it very clear that any code of procedure accompanying it must make clear ‘the importance and the utility that the magistrate speak in didactic language, and not insinuate’. The legislator – that is, the Code of Procedure – had to tell judges ‘how to formulate/how to consider’ rather than ‘indicate what might be expedient or advisable’.69 Clearly, French norms were not yet being adhered to. To Italians, this could be seen as yet another assault on the independence of the judiciary, but also as an insult to their level of civilisation. In French hands, justice could easily fall into a straightjacket less because of statute law, which might be reformed, but through procedures that made the judge little more than a cipher for the codes. Pushed to its logical conclusion, trials only existed to apply the codes to cases, oblivious to particular circumstances. More than this, the slavish imposition of French procedures would prevent society being dealt with in ways that would lead to fair judgements; neither would these procedures inspire confidence in the system. The Italian magistracy had to accept the open trial, but elements within it continued to be unhappy with the French manner of open debate and ideas exchanged spontaneously in public. If public debate had to be employed, it should at least be structured, not what they regarded as a ‘free-for-all’. The collective observation of the magistrates of the Civil Tribunal of Bologna put it thus in 1810: Experience has shown that the method of deliberation set out by the code of procedure has not met the purposes of justice.

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Applying indistinctly to all and any court, and to whatever case, the forms (of the Code of Procedure) . . . there have been some times when the interests of the law have been prejudiced, and it has proved impossible to repair them. Consequently, new dispositions are needed to establish separating questioning and the successive deliberations, from later deliberations on the facts and on questions of law.70 Almost ten years of experience of the public trial, and three of the Code of Procedure, had left these judges convinced that the French system was not helping the administration of justice in its daily work. Politically, this was ground on which the most reactionary and the most enlightened Italian jurists made common cause. During the work for the new Penal Code in 1806, Luosi made a case for the importance of the public trial generally, but particularly in criminal cases, as a means of ‘educating the multitude’ in how justice actually operated; it was the obvious way to teach them how the new system worked, and it would inspire confidence in the new regime.71 Many of his colleagues took a very different view, and the sum of their objections – and their attempts to evade this very core of French procedures – carried within them the view that Luosi and their French ‘regenerators’ had forgotten that the as yet ‘unregenerated’ Italian multitude – a perception all shared – were not ready for this. Although they could not criticise Luosi’s assertions in so many words, their reactions to the impact of the new system showed a belief that, although the French may have thought about the impact of the public trial on the multitude, they had forgotten the impact of the multitude on the workings of justice. Article 87 of the Code of Procedure allowed certain trials to be held in camera, usually in very delicate cases of family law involving children, in particular, but only if permission was granted by the Minister of Justice. A regular flow of petitions from the lower tribunals reached Luosi from 1807 onwards, which sought to stretch this interpretation of ‘family cases’ to those involving inheritance, mental competence and legal separations of couples. The regular refrain of the lower courts was that the public exposition of these matters ‘offended public decency’, but also often referred to the scandalous behaviour of the public gallery when such cases had been held in open court.72 Although permissions were often granted by Luosi, after over four years

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of attempts to ‘abuse’ the terms of Article 87, he sent a stinging rebuke to the Appeal Court of Milan – one of the most senior courts in the Kingdom – not only refusing its particular request, but accusing it of encouraging the lower courts to believe they could use Article 87 to reduce the scope of cases that could be held in public far beyond the purpose of exemptions.73 Beyond this was the abuse of the new system by Italians themselves. A French adviser to the commission for the Code of Procedure, Oudart, was concerned by the quality of questioning by many Italian magistrates, reporting incidents of judges simply asking a witness ‘Is the defendant guilty?’74 Other reactions from provincial magistrates complained that cross-examination often degenerated into bullying, particularly of witnesses or defendants known to be of weak disposition, mainly women, children and the mentally ill, which frequently arose in the more salacious cases they wanted tried in camera.75 The principle of cross-examination may have been ‘consecrated’ as a sign of revolutionary progress in procedure by the 1802 Metodo Generale – which encouraged judges to refrain from intervening during questioning76 – but the principle of this kind of questioning was neither widely loved nor even understood, as subsequent experience proved when the opinions of magistrates were eventually sought. At the other extreme, it was seized upon by overzealous advocates as a way to impress the gallery or assert personal power. The observations of a committee of senior magistrates in 1810 also expressed reservations about the questioning of this kind of witness, and of the practice of cross-examination in such circumstances.77 The office of the public prosecutor also posed problems for the Italian magistrates, in matters of procedure, both because it proved difficult to separate his role from that of the judges, but also because his protected position could lead, in the view of many judges, to arrogance in his conduct in open court, where he had an audience. Ritori complained in 1803, that the public prosecutor was too often: raging as if in the arena where he supported the arguments of punitive justice against inquiry. Basically, he spoke of his glorious talents, and for that very reason, he had his own interests to assert, because the judges had prior knowledge to second his indications.78

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This was no minor quibble; the public prosecutor was pivotal to the French system. Italian dislike of the office was compounded by the seemingly excessive power and influence given him by the public nature of the trial. However, even the supposed position of power accorded this official by open court did not prevent many public prosecutors requesting trials in camera for delicate family matters, perhaps the most emphatic indication of the unease the public trial could evoke in the Italian legal classes. A sense of fairness, as this legal culture understood it, led some prosecutors to abjure the potential power of their office.79 The news that Napoleon had suspended juries for criminal cases in the Kingdom, on 17 June 1805, was greeted with general relief among senior magistrates; unease at their applicability to Italian conditions had been expressed as early as 1802.80 There were hopes that the absence of juries might help preserve the independence of magistrates in forming judgements in a system of codified law, for without them, the role of the magistrate in assessing evidence was inevitably enhanced.81 Even this rare moment of complete agreement between the French and senior Italian magistrates contained a lone dissenting voice. A member of the 1802 commission for the framing of a criminal code for the Republic, Pellegati disagreed with the general attitude that juries would never suit Italian society. Although he concurred that the convulsed circumstances of 1802 made them dangerous, he wanted to leave scope for their possible introduction at a later date. Juries were part of the structure of enlightened justice, and should not be lightly discarded because of the present emergency: ‘Because this is not about giving the Italian nation a provisional code, but a stable one, and thus it is desirable, in the course of human events, (a code) for perpetuity.’82 Juries were, after all, an English invention appropriated by the French revolutionaries, and suspected by Napoleon. As such, they had an intellectual claim to universalism, as an expression of the better aspects of human nature, which a rigid code of procedure did not. The Italian enlightenment could still cling to hope and progress.

Empire and enlightenment The debates over the nature and content of legal reform in the Napoleonic Republic/Kingdom of Italy were an exercise in a new kind of imperialism. It took place in an intellectual context where all shades of

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opinion identified openly with the reforming impulses of enlightenment. Within the elitist parameters of the Italian magistracy, there were frequent warnings that the wider compass of Italian society found the new legal world unpalatable, but there were few signs of genuine reaction, of a desire to put the clock back, among those ‘inside the system’. Instead, the discussions, which ranged over a decade, reveal two reforming traditions, both with roots in enlightenment ideas of the late ancien re´gime, but which diverged sharply when put to the test of effecting practical reform. The Napoleonic regime had, effectively, adopted one current of enlightenment thought as its official ideology. What Jonathan Israel had identified as the radical enlightenment, which became mainstream only in France, and only in the second half of the eighteenth century,83 was seized upon by the new regime, because imperial expansion demanded a determined, holistic approach to reform if the core values of the French Revolution were to take root in alien soil, and also because the radical enlightenment, certainly according to Voltaire, chimed well with absolutism. In the hands of Napoleonic imperialists, certain currents of the radical enlightenment, which were meant to serve as an imperial ideology, hardened into the closest example possible to a ‘national’ enlightenment’, that of ‘regenerated’ France. This did not close off dialogue with Italian reformers, but it made it very difficult, for much of the time. Perversely, dealing with the monolith of Napoleonic imperialism taught Italian reformers in the Republic/Kingdom that, for all their differences, they had more in common with each other, than with the French, on a range of seminal issues. The variety of experience among the pre-Napoleonic states of the ancien re´gime would make it a nonsense to speak of this coming together as a ‘national’ enlightenment. Indeed, the intellectual climate of northern Italy in the eighteenth century was far more open to a wider range of external ideas than France. Yet this very pluralism was among the common strands Italians found when confronted with an imperial ideology of conformity. The holistic insistence of the French on the application of the letter of their own codes, and the nature of much of their legislation, particularly in criminal matters, family law and court procedures, produced a unity and cohesion among Italians that their diverse ancien re´gime backgrounds would scarcely have credited: a shared intellectual background fostered

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this consensus, which centred on a belief in judicial reform as a model for social change in the context of their own society. Increasingly, Italian magistrates came to argue in terms of Montesquieu, seeking explanations for their defence of judicial independence, the retention of Roman law as an active agency in many spheres of life, and for a less draconian criminal code. They increasingly turned to the theories of a conservative enlightenment that rejected the universalism claimed by the Voltairian salon. To defend Beccaria against what had become a ‘French enlightenment’ whose standard bearer was Voltaire, they increasingly had to take refuge in Montesquieu. To this end, however, something of Beccaria had to be jettisoned. Their most significant modifications to his canon were, first, an implied renunciation of its universalism, as they had to accept that the French had created a set of law codes at variance with their own aspirations, thus proving in concrete terms, that different societies drew on different experiences: the ‘French way’ was too secular, and too individualist in matters of the family, for Italian mores; this was the work of regional, historic experiences which could not be shrugged off. Unlike Beccaria in his creative phase, most of them – when faced with the Napoleonic model – came to believe that Roman law still had some place in the workings of justice. Nevertheless, Italian magistrates often clung to the letter, as well as the ethos, of legal reform as espoused by Cesare Beccaria. Their persistent refusal to accept many key elements of French criminal law stemmed from different roots: one of the greatest hopes of enlightened reformers in eighteenth-century Italy had been to see an end to the brutal system of punishments for criminal offences, even for an end to capital punishment, as had come about in Tuscany. This was not a set of hopes based on any indigenous tradition, but the product of intellectual engagement with enlightened thinking, and almost all Italian magistrates stood by this commitment. Where cracks appeared in this unlikely uniformity, they came from two utterly different sources. The Modenese magistracy, epitomised by Luosi, found more in common with the French than their Lombard or Bolognese colleagues, because they had been the lynchpin of a reforming absolutism. Equally committed to crushing clerical and aristocratic privilege, they were less circumspect in discarding Roman law traditions over family law, for they saw this as a relic of noble privilege, more than a building block of a

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stable society. It is no coincidence that many Modenese rose high in the service of the Napoleonic kingdom.84 Where the French found Lombard support of a similar kind, it was among the isolated figures like Melzi d’Aril, who had supported the absolutist initiatives of Joseph II, an experience in centralising uniformity which had turned many previous apologists for absolutism against its more extreme manifestations, and might have served as a warning for the French. The other crack in the ranks of the magistracy, over the nature of legal reform, came from the Venetians. They did not enter the kingdom until 1807, and their ancien re´gime heritage inclined them more to separatism, and so to a resentment of a uniform, national set of codes, than other parts of the Kingdom, whose progressive elements had welcomed the end of papal or Austrian rule. If truly reactionary tendencies emerged in the discussions or behaviour of the senior magistracy, it came from this regional quarter. The Italian magistrates lost these arguments, for the Napoleonic concept of the state, as well as of imperial hegemony, brooked no compromise in matters of the law. There is a need to set the disagreements between Italian magistrates in the wider context of the vast scope of Napoleonic legal reform. The abolition of torture and the significant reduction of the use of the sequestration of property, their approach to property relations and commercial law, all received widespread endorsement, as did the concept of a single, uniform set of law codes for the entire state, agreement underpinned by the newness and composite nature of the Italian polity. There was no marked desire among them, save perhaps the Venetians, for a ‘hierarchy of law’ such as practised by the British Raj, which allowed the retention of traditional, existing laws and procedures at local level, imposing complete uniformity only at the highest levels of appeal.85 The concept of a uniform code was axiomatic to French and Italians alike. Italians looked to codified law, imposed uniformly over the entire nation, as the surest safeguard against any return to the arbitrary character of ancien re´gime justice, a hatred shared by all of them. It was when French norms over too rigid an approach to sentencing appeared to jeopardise this that opposition emerged. Common ground stretched only so far. The contents of the codes, and the concepts that underpinned them, were anything but agreed between the imperial centre and the elites of its most important satellite state.

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The intellectual sophistication of those elites, not their backwardness, made them difficult to clone, seen most clearly in their intellectual objections to an approach to codification they regarded as facile, imprecise and slipshod. When they returned in 1814, the Austrians discovered the same. In January 1826, Guido Castiglione, ‘a judge of Milan’, wrote to the Austrian Governor-General of the province of Lombardy: The public administration needs a precious gift of the Enlightenment; it needs a Code which is as brief as possible, uniform for the whole kingdom; devoid of anything unnecessary, clear, and which is demanded by simple necessity; it can be easily conceived by making the best choices from the many existing administrative laws, some in force, and some of which have been abolished.86 If Castiglione clung to the French ideal of the code as brief and clear, neither had he rejected Justinian or the laws he had inherited. The Austrians, too, had a well-educated, independent intelligentsia to cope with.

4 IMPERIAL LAW ON THE MARCHES OF EMPIRE: NAPOLEONIC LEGAL REFORMS IN CATALONIA, 1810—131

T

he province of Catalonia was the farthest-flung, least secure region Napoleon ever sought to annex directly to France. Indeed, there was never actually a formal annexation, but a series of decrees early in 1812, which created four departments for the province and despatched French officials to run them, and two commissioners to create judicial institutions modelled directly on those of the empire, left no doubt that, had the regime survived, Catalonia would have been absorbed fully into the empire. The ground had been laid as early as February 1810 when Napoleon confiscated all Spain north of the river Ebro from his brother Joseph and put the provinces of Viscaya, Navarre, Arago´n and Catalonia under the direct rule of their French military commanders. However, the remit of the generals in Viscaya, Navarre, and Arago´n was limited to military control and keeping the lines of communication to France as safe as possible: they continued to work with and through the local Spanish authorities they found in place. Catalonia went down a different path. Even before Napoloen determined on its annexation, in the first months of 1810, its military commander, Augereau, developed ambitions to put the province under civil institutions closely modelled on those of France, and took a greater interest in the administration and the future of Catalonia than the commandants of the other northern

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provinces. This ensured that the experience of Catalonia during the French occupation was considerably more complex than that of the other northern provinces. This is not to imply that the Catalan experience of Napoleonic rule was profound in the sense that French institutions or legislation took lasting root there. In 1808– 9, the French held only the city of Barcelona – itself blockaded by sea by the British – and a small area around the fortress of Figueras, on the border with France; even after the key fortress of Girona was taken after a ten-month siege in the last days of 1809, the French still lacked a firm grip on the immediate area. At what might pass for the ‘height’ of Napoleonic rule in Catalonia, the French exercised real control only over the city of Barcelona and its immediate environs following the fall of Tarragona in May 1811– the seat of the patriot Junta – together with an area around Girona, which embraced, at its height, about 400 municipalities – pobles – which was often cut off from Barcelona completely by rebel forces, and never linked directly to it, at the best of times. Of the four departments created on paper by the French in February 1812, only two – the Ter, with its capital at Girona, and the Monserrat, based on Barcelona – were ever under anything like stable, continuous control.2 The French presence in the Segre and Bouches de l’Ebre (Ebro) was ephemeral, at best.3 The history of ‘Napoleonic Catalonia’ is the history of these two enclaves. None of this dented the determination of the French officials sent to Barcelona and Girona to lay the foundations of Napoleonic imperialism in such dangerous terrain, however. If French rule left less tangible traces here than anywhere else in the empire, it nevertheless presents an interesting example of the evolution of French thinking about how to rule their empire. The experience of the French in Catalonia, as quite distinct from that of the Catalans under Napoleonic rule, offers an illuminating window on the imperial mind at work in wholly adverse circumstances.

The vicissitudes of the French occupation, 1808 –12 French troops had occupied most of the key strategic military parts of Catalonia since 1807, in accordance with the Franco-Spanish alliance, and their presence attracted no real comment or friction until the popular risings of the summer of 1808, which engulfed the province in

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the same abrupt, violent manner as much of the rest of Spain. The last months of 1808 and early 1809 saw Barcelona besieged by resurgent Spanish forces. Communications with France were always imperilled and often severed, altogether, by the resistance of the fortresses of Tarragona and Girona. By the first months of 1809, however, Barcelona and Figueras were under firm French control. However tenuous the occupation looked to contemporaries, their grip on these two enclaves lasted until 1814. For all its pragmatic concern with exploitation and military security, the French occupation of Catalonia between 1808 and 1812 had left important legacies for the officials sent out to effect annexation in 1812. The military situation meant that the experiences of the two French enclaves of Barcelona-Tarragona and Girona-Figueras were somewhat different: Barcelona, under unbroken, if far from firm, French rule from 1808 onwards, actually underwent a more fluctuating series of governors and policy initiatives than the north-east, which was occupied and administered first under Augereau, who had an active interest in the government of Catalonia, and then in 1812 by French officials bent on assimilation; the Girona-Figueras enclave came under French rule only weeks before the February decrees of 1810. Even then, the fortress of Figueras was lost and retaken, and lost again in the course of the wars, and large swathes of the countryside, even within the 400 pobles – the lowest unit of local government the French equated with the commune – was never free from the partidas, or from the administrative influence of the patriot Junta, with its shifting but ever-present headquarters, which included an alternative source of justice in its Audiencı´a, which was composed of members of the original, pre-war Audiencı´a of Barcelona. This body wielded a legitimacy the French institutions could never hope to match, but the convulsed conditions created by the war often made it more inaccessible to those in need of justice than the institutions under French control. Although the French initially retained the Audiencı´a in Barcelona, very few cases were actually brought before it; Duhesme, the French commandant and effective ruler of the city continually referred to the paralysis of the courts of the city in 1808– 9, something which only began to change in the spring of 1810, after his own dismissal and the prospect of annexation and more secure French control. Before 1810, many in Barcelona avoided recourse to the pro-French afrancesado

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tribunals as much as possible, to avoid the taint of collaboration in convulsed circumstances, if nothing else.4 The behaviour of many in the city offers an example of deliberate refusal to acknowledge the new regime through a boycott of foreign or illegitimate justice, which bears comparison with the Piacentino valleys of north-western Italy, where few cases came before the French tribunals after the ruthless suppression of the 1805–1806 revolt, and with the trend detected by Michel Brunet, just over the border in Roussillon, where many communities turned to informal arbitration during the whole Revolutionary-Napoleonic period, to avoid forms of justice and statute law they disliked.5 The reasons for this were clear enough in the direct experience of the city, and only reinforced any less tangible ideological and dynastic loyalties that may have motivated a collective resentment of French rule. Even the depredations of military requisitioning and the Blockade were not needed to drive the point home that the administration of justice was not in capable hands under the French before 1810. The first French commanders in Barcelona had been content to leave most of the civil and judicial administration of the city in the hands of the Spanish royal administration, but the ruthless demands of security and requisitioning had driven most of the civil administrators and some of the senior magistrates to emigration.6 Duhesme had never actually tried to force the hands of the magistracy to acknowledge the legitimacy of French rule, only to co-operate on pragmatic grounds, but in April 1809 his superior, Marshal Gouvion St Cyr, demanded that the Audiencı´a swear a public oath of loyalty to the empire on 9 April – a Sunday – on the steps of the Palace of Justice, on Plaza San Jaume. It was a catastrophe. Before a large crowd, Duhesme harangued the Audiencı´a that French military successes in the region had cut Catalonia off from the rest of Spain – which was true – and that further resistance was irresponsible. Then, in a premeditated act of collective defiance, all but two of the magistrates refused the oath, beginning with its most senior member, A´lvarez de Menieta. Even the two judges who swore it, Lo´pez de Frı´as and Soler del Olmo, declared they were doing so only under duress, like colleagues in Madrid and Zaragossa, after those cities had fallen to the French. The crowds cheered wildly as the bulk of the Audiencı´a was carted off to prison. Nevertheless, their example was widely followed at the lower levels of both the municipal and judicial administration.7

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The result was a disaster for the French, for many lower magistrates who fled the city in the wake of these events simply left cases they were handling undealt with, while the arrest of the Audiencı´a created chaos at the highest level of the administration of justice. The patriot Junta’s judicial organ, at Tarragona, then began to receive cases in need of settlement.8 Thus, there was a direct challenge to the French reforms from the outset. In a seminal article on the administration of justice in Napoleonic Catalonia, Pedro del Pozo Carrascosa has seen the character of sentencing as the chief influence of the French presence in judicial matters, even when Spanish law and procedures were maintained before 1812, specifically in the Audiencı´a of Barcelona between 1809 and 1811.9 This is hardly surprising, when the events of 9 April made their impact on the composition of the Audiencı´a. A Belgian, Uraux d’Amelin, became corrigedor; Duhesme himself took over as President of the Audiencı´a. The only prominent Catalan on the new court was Madinaveyita, a well-known lawyer, but an afrancesado of long standing, and the son-in-law of the notorious Casanova, the hated collaborationist chief of police, and the most powerful Catalan in the city by 1809.10 It was hardly a recipe for instilling public confidence, but equally it put the highest court in the province – the only effective source of last appeal given Barcelona’s isolation from both Madrid and Paris – in the hands of foreigners. Insistence on the swearing of public oaths of loyalty – the forcing of hands – had been the bane of the French revolutionaries since the oath imposed on the French clergy to the new constitution in 1790. The Napoleonic regime persisted in this proven error to the end. Two years after this policy destabilised the highest court in Catalonia, the imposition of the same oath in the new Roman departments in 1811 created from the Papal States, provoked a similar refusal by the senior lay magistrates of the deposed papal regime, and the 306 curiali initially refused the oath. All but 14 of them were eventually broken, but the French did not trust those who swore it enough to employ them.11 If the people of Barcelona needed a lesson in what French criminal justice could mean in action, it came soon enough. In May 1809, a serious conspiracy to incite a revolt within the city was discovered, which possibly included some of the few Catalans left on the Audiencı´a according to Casanova. What followed was the infamous ‘trial of the

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Citadel’, in which four of the 18 accused were publicly executed. This is hardly surprising, but the trial itself, held on 2 June 1809, was preceded by a debate about whether French or Spanish law should be used: the composition of the court and the relative severity of the revolutionary legislation available to it led the Audiencı´a to opt for the former, and the four condemned were executed under the terms of two acts passed under the Directory in 1795 and 1796.12 In the years that followed, successive French administrators had to try to counteract this heritage. Further north, in the convulsed area around Girona and Figueras, the problem was different, for the traumas of war had led to an almost complete absence of reliable, accessible justice of any kind. The administration of justice suffered from the ravages of war as much as any other aspect of the life of the region, particularly in the wake of the siege of Girona, which ended in December 1809, and left the area in ruins.13 All this produced circumstances where, whether for politicised reasons or not, people had to ‘make do’, and informal justice was becoming prevalent. These needs, and the potential they offered for winning support for regime change, were not lost on Augereau in 1810, and his Catalan adviser and policy-maker, Toma`s Puig. When Augereau was replaced by MacDonald in May 1810, Puig’s reports to him on the state of the administration in the north-east may have been exaggerated and self-serving, but they were not fundamentally wrong. ‘Disorganisation had become general,’ he told MacDonald in his first report to him on his arrival, adding that ‘After so disastrous a time, and in a country which was still a war zone, it has been impossible to establish a regular plan of administration’.14 Puig doubtless exaggerated the corruption among the local legal classes, in the light of Degerando’s later, more favourable view of their good qualities, but Puig pointed to the real dangers of the breakdown of control by the senior courts of Barcelona over the local magistrates and lawyers: the prostitution of the magistrates (is) complete; empowered by the contradictions of the law and the confusion of procedures, they sell their opinions . . . money alone drives them . . . All the lawyers know how to do, is consult the size of their client’s purse, rather than the law codes . . . in this country, they are regarded the same as the men who frequent the gaming tables.15

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Where Puig’s overview of the situation in Girona rings most true is less in his denunciations of the magistracy, whom he disliked simply for being men of the old order, than in his factual accounts of the failure of the efforts of Reille, the French commandant of Girona, and himself, to restore basic law and order. Although Puig stressed that Reille’s arrival marked a real improvement, it was still the case that new maires had to be elected almost every day, so rapid were their resignations, and that people refused to accept posts of any kind: ‘It is amidst such difficulties that the authorities could only use the voice of persuasion to obtain the help that force could not.’ Puig and Reille had tried to create a local police force, but no one came forward to join it.16 The glimmers of hope, since Reille and Puig established a French model of justice, were that tribunals composed of more than one judge offered less scope for corrupt verdicts, and the creation of Juge(s) de paix: Since this noble magistrate has begun to exercise his duties, discord has been stifled in its cradle; he represents the true good father, dispersing the clouds which arise in the heart of the family itself, by his calming influence. How many court cases has this (area) avoided (because of him)? How many families, on the verge of declaring a cruel war on themselves, have been reunited through the means of a private reconciliation? The ‘satellites’ of the Bar, armed with their depositions for combat, have been obliged to withdraw in shame. The interests of the individual feel the benefits of this institution.17 As will be seen, the Juge(s) de paix stood out in Catalonia as a genuinely popular institution, but their importance also points to the breakdown of the senior courts in the north-east. Puig’s brief comment on the failure of his police force to get off the ground is actually a powerful indication of the extent to which communities were on their own, not only in terms of the administration of justice but in self-defence, by 1810. This made the circumstances of the Girona-Figueras enclave very different from the military security of Barcelona. All the limitations of French effectiveness on the ground notwithstanding, the brief tenure of command by Augereau in Catalonia between January and May marked a crucial stage in the evolution of imperial policy in the region, and its impact far outweighed

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the short time Augereau held the direction of affairs in the province. His arrival in command came just ahead of the decrees of February, and marked the moment when Paris moved beyond an occupation based purely on military necessity, to a period of deliberate preparation for annexation. The plans Augereau and his chief Catalan collaborator, Toma`s Puig, elaborated for Catalonia in these months did not correspond to the complete assimilation into the French Empire laid down in Paris, and their higher hopes remained dead letters. However, the importance Augereau and Puig attached to the implantation of French institutions, and the introduction of the legal codes, court structures and procedures above all, began a process of change which opened the way for the work of Degerando and Chauvelin, the judicial commissioners, and the team of young auditeurs of the Conseil d’E´tat, who composed the prefects and sub-prefects. The work begun under Augereau also introduced the ‘language issue’ to centre stage, especially in the context of legal reform. The use of Catalan as an official language in place of Castilian now emerged as part of Napoleonic strategies of assimilation, and continued to interest French officials from then onwards. Augereau had served in Catalonia in the campaigns of 1793 and 1795, and felt he had some knowledge of the country. He had obviously developed a genuine interest in it, and his projects should never be regarded as an attempt to carve out a fief for himself, for Augereau was one of Napoleon’s oldest and most loyal comrades, if hardly his most reliable, prone to bouts of depression. Rather, the interest he took in the projects of Toma`s Puig for a devolved Catalonian region within the empire reflect a federated vision of a wider empire which was simply redundant in the corridors of Parisian power. Both men seemed either unaware of the increasing rigidity of the centre’s holistic attitude towards annexation by 1810, or they hoped to convince their superiors that the case of Catalonia was so singular, so far-flung from the rest of the empire, that exceptions had to be made for it. Nevertheless, neither Augereau nor Puig were in any doubt that Catalonia had to be brought as closely as possible towards imperial norms,18 and in those of the law, above all. Augereau announced the February decrees with great public display in Girona, and they came as the culmination of a series of paternalistic decrees aimed at placating the Catalans. This was soon followed up with concrete measures, which included the sacking of many afrancesado

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officials appointed by Duhesme and Gouvion St Cyr, Casanova most prominent among them. Tellingly, these decrees were issued in Catalan, as well as French, the clearest indication possible that Augereau, influenced and advised by Puig, was preparing to move in a new direction. The afrancesado authorities in Barcelona took little notice of the Girona proclamation, or the February decrees, so inured were they to changes of direction from the French.19 Girona was different, however. Here, the need for change and stability was more deeply felt among those less ideologically committed to Napoleon, but who had remained in office from a sense of duty to preserve a semblance of order, as well as ideological collaborators like Puig. Augereau’s policy was driven by a quest for uniformity within a federal structure; translated into Catalan realities in 1810, this began with the attempt to impose institutional uniformity on the two French enclaves of Barcelona and Girona, to end separate development, as it were, by the imposition of French norms. For the moment, the lead came from Girona, where its afrancesado administrators, led by Puig, were far less tainted by corruption, and viewed far more favourably by the French on the ground, than those in Barcelona, who had become increasingly in thrall to Casanova. Napoleon had come to see most of the Spanish in French service north of the Ebro as undesirable and unreliable,20 and repeated complaints about many Catalan local officials continued throughout the period of French rule. However, Puig had been trusted from the outset, along with men he approved of, such as Parez, who would soon become indispensable to Degerando. However hated by public opinion – Puig’s house in Figueras was sacked more than once until, in 1808, he had to flee to Llanca` where he joined the French for good21 – the power base among the Catalan afrancesado had now shifted to Puig’s circle in Girona. The Catalan afrancesado were far from a monolith, and the emergence of Puig under Augereau spelt the end for the purely opportunistic domination of Casanova, rooted in Barcelona, and the emergence in power, however short-lived, of ideologically committed supporters of the French. Puig and Augereau inaugurated a policy of deliberate gradualism as a means of bringing the Catalan public sphere more closely in line with that of the empire, a flawed interpretation of Napoleonic policy which ensured their direction of affairs did not last long. Their approach was doomed almost from the outset by the February decrees, but their influence survived Augereau’s recall from the province, even if Puig and

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his men were soon subordinated to Degerando. This is witnessed by Puig’s assumption of the presidency of the Cour d’Appel, modelled exactly on French norms, set up by Degerando and Chauvelin in Barcelona as the senior court for all four departments. Certainly, Puig lost the extensive power and influence he had held under Augereau, but his appointment to a senior post in Barcelona signalled the final eclipse of the discredited afrancesado administration, rooted in the city, assembled by Duhesme and Casanova. The ‘federalist’ semi-autonomy sought by Puig and Augereau brought them down, together with Napoleon’s growing awareness that, to the majority of Catalans, an afrancesado was an afrancesado. Puig, once an influential local notable in Figueras before 1808, was branded by his collaboration as a traitor and oppressor by public opinion. By relying on him so heavily, Augereau undid his own usefulness to imperial policy. It was one thing to employ Puig and men like him to facilitate practical cooperation over requisitions and local intelligence, quite another to be seen to let them dictate policy: making him the highest magistrate in Catalonia, and using both his loyalty and legal expertise in the French system, embedding him in a French institution, the Cour d’Appel, rather than setting him at the head of an independent administration. The example of Puig’s redeployment encapsulated the policy that marked the replacement of Augereau by Marshal MacDonald in May 1810, and which lasted until October 1811. MacDonald began the trend that would last to the end of French control: he imported Frenchmen into the highest ranks of the administration, in place of afrancesado, to ensure the end of gradualist policies and hasten the process of full assimilation. This also opened the way for a wider collaboration with the less ideologically committed, but potentially co-operative elements in the Catalan elites. Augereau had done much to pave the way for this, in unhorsing Casanova’s networks, but he could not effectively replace them. As a result, ordinary law and order, and public administration, had suffered. His immediate legacy was of disorder, and this is where MacDonald returned to the classic Napoleonic appeal for support among the propertied classes, with his promises to restore basic law and order, and impartiality, regardless of previous political allegiances. His decrees made direct appeals to Catalans to stop fighting each other, to forget the past, and to concentrate on the practical urgencies of rebuilding

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their infrastructure and economy. To this end, MacDonald set about securing the main routes around Barcelona from the partidas, and created a protected convoy system to allow at least a limited commerce with France and the north of the province. Casanova was finally deported in November, although he went on to become the senior police commissioner of Genoa in 1812.22 Blondel, a Frenchman who had worked under Casanova but had been a secret agent in the pay of the Foreign Ministry, took his place. MacDonald extended the time limit of the amnesty for e´migre´s, if only by a month, and tried to open a dialogue with as wide a spectrum of the elites as he could by calling a junta together at Girona, and welcoming anyone of standing who chose to come. He promised this junta an end to arbitrary rule, and above all to end random requisitioning, and to protect property and commerce. This was the context in which he brought in French officials to head the civil administration: to ensure equity.23 This trend, and the thinking behind it, accelerated in the next two years. Nevertheless, many of the details of Puig’s programme continued to influence MacDonald, as they would Degerando, after him. Two key elements of Puig’s thinking found their way to the core of imperial policy: the first was, simply, the identity of ideological interest between Catalan afrancesado and the French, in the abolition of seigneurialism, of the Inquisition and in the rationalisation of the Church in accordance with the Concordat. Puig and MacDonald both envisaged extinguishing the Spanish legal system completely; here, the difference was one of means, not ends. Imperial policy had discarded gradualism for the ruthless ‘clean break’ by 1810, not only in Catalonia, but in the new Dutch, Hansa, and central Italian departments, following the perceived failure of gradualism by the policies of the Consulta` in the Roman departments in 1809–10.24 It was for this reason, not a severe lack of personnel versed in French law, that in 1812 Degerando decided to continue to use Catalan forms of procedure until Paris ordered the definitive implantation of the French codes in the region: he had come to believe that it was better to impose the French legislation and procedures in toto at once than to elaborate ad hoc legislation which corresponded to those of the empire, but did not match them completely.25 Puig’s report to MacDonald in May 1810 seethed with genuine hatred for the legal institutions of the old order, and left no doubt that his ultimate aims were those of his French successors:

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The foundations of justice were vicious, because the Spanish code was nothing but a mass of confused Gothic, Roman and Arab laws, put together without order or coherence . . . In a word, the code offered only a very uncertain law.26 Seigneurial justice was an obscenity: ‘(T)hese vestiges of feudal power which the barbarians brought us from the German forests are still in full vigour,’ nobles were still appointing their own judges on their fiefs.27 None of this fury, redolent of the anger of 1789 in France now transferred to a new battlefield, abated under Degerando.28 This war would continue, and even intensify, in the last phase of French rule, but with the rejection of any gradualist ‘halfway house’ for newly annexed regions, the only viable administrative method of absorption was the extensive deployment of French officials, even at the levels of sub-prefect or on the civil tribunals, not just in senior posts. This whole policy is encapsulated by the imperial decree of 14 July 1811 issued in the course of the annexation of the Kingdom of Holland and the Hanseatic cities, but applicable throughout the empire, that all public prosecutors of the new tribunals – at every level – and as many as possible of their presidents (the most senior judges) were to be French, and that all future replacements in these posts were also to be drawn from ‘the Interior’ or ‘old France’. Degerando would do all he could to effect exactly this in Catalonia. His determination to follow this imperial decree to the letter was made clear by the Minister of Justice to Napoleon, directly, in May 1812: Monsieur Degerando, while insistent that the part of Catalonia in a position to undergo a prompt, regularised organisation (of the administration of justice), has also informed me of the very great difficulties there will be in staffing the tribunals; he thinks that not only their presidents and public prosecutors, but even a third to a quarter of their judges, must be drawn from France, which is scarcely possible.29 Degerando had become ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, as it were. This increasingly aggressive rejection of any question of Catalan control over the magistracy, to say nothing of the abandonment of ‘federalism’ or gradualism, should not occlude the underlying affinities

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between Degerando and Puig. An important point of accord between the policies of Puig and those of Degerando was outlined in Puig’s ‘Memorandum on Catalonia’, drawn up for Augereau. It pertained to the particular circumstances the French inherited in Catalonia, less in the immediate situation they found, but in the legacy of local history. This sensibility to the background of the Catalan public sphere, first implanted in the French official mind by Puig, did not fade. MacDonald and then Degerando, and Paris above all, took full cognisance of the singularity of Catalan history in the hopes of turning it to the advantage of long-term assimilation. Seen with the detachment of hindsight, there is a deep-seated incongruity at the heart of French imperial policy from Augereau onwards that, by acknowledging Catalan uniqueness in a Spanish context, a complete assimilation into the norms of the empire, and so the ultimate obliteration of that very uniqueness, could be made easier and achieved with greater speed. Puig’s legacy to imperial policy in Catalonia was an increasing willingness to draw on the recent history of the region to this end. It found its most tangible expression in the continued use of Catalan for official purposes under MacDonald, both for decrees and by making it the language of French official journals; the language issue would reach its apogee in the debates over the Civil Code in 1812. However, the French showed themselves prepared to confront far wider implications than the language issue. Indeed, the question of the adoption of Catalan over Castilian, alongside French, as the official language, was but one aspect of a wider legacy.

The process of annexation: The missions of Degerando and Chauvelin, 1812 –13 When Napoleon finally despatched his two judicial commissioners to the two parts of the four new Catalan departments he actually controlled, the very fact that there were two such simultaneous appointments, operating independently of each other, de facto if not in theory, showed how fragmented French power remained. Their contrasting experiences – that of Degerando in Girona, and of Chauvelin in Barcelona – reflect the continuation of the different experiences of the two enclaves during the occupation. Degerando had by far the more dangerous task, beset by the incursions of Blake’s regular forces, and the

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depredations of the partidas, whose behaviour, at least through French eyes, does much to re-enforce the view of Charles Esdaile, that there was, indeed, the thinnest line between the guerrilla and plain banditry, if one existed at all.30 Chauvelin, by contrast, operated in a militarily secure environment, his problems stemming from the reluctance of senior magistrates to enter French service, and from a cultural and ideological resistance to the nature of the Napoleonic reforms. For all the hinderances Degerando faced in Girona, he had one potential advantage Chauvelin did not: the Girona-Figueras enclave showed signs of a desire for order, and for any form of reliable justice after so long an anarchy. Barcelona had not been reduced to such a state of chaos, however deeply the Blockade had bitten into its economic life.31

Degerando in the Girona enclave By 1812, the efforts of Puig, Augereau and then MacDonald to set the administration of justice on a normal footing had been seen to be incomplete, at best. The situation was set out with stark precision in April 1812 to Degerando shortly after his arrival in Girona the previous month by Pedro Cabmox, the afrancesado President of the civil tribunal of Figueras, which had been set up by the French earlier in the occupation, in 1810: (The motives for so few cases reaching the tribunal since its creation) are because the parties-at-law have reached amicable arrangements without recourse to the tribunal. There are some among them who could not reach the tribunal when it had to flee to Castellon de Arripurias for several months, because of the attack on Figueras. There is, just as much, the motive that parties cannot come to court, because they cannot find counsel, and would have to put their documentation before the court by themselves, all of which contributes to the general misery of the country.32 That this emanated from Figueras, the part of the province longest under French control, makes it all the more striking, just as it is a reminder that the Spanish were able to besiege it as late as 1811 and disrupt Napoleonic administration so thoroughly. At local level, subsequent French reforms which sought to abolish seigneurialism dealt a further

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blow to the accessibility of justice because so many courts in the region were themselves seigneurial, as Degerando was forced to admit.33 Such circumstances created a sense of unease among the magistracy, less to flee – which was not as easy as in Barcelona, because safety was harder to find in the north – than to try to lie low, which caused critical problems for the administration of justice. Many did not feel secure enough to buy official robes, and sat in ordinary clothes, and this attitude influenced the public, in turn. Degerando noted this sense of insecurity as late as April 1812: The judges only consider themselves as provisional, and so put . . . rather little effort into the expedition of business; all of them have kept their private practices as a source of income for an uncertain future. For the same reason, they want to do as little as possible . . . The same uncertainty has spread to the public; the fear of (future) events that would lead to the return of the insurgents, leads them to turn to a sort of informal arbitration, or to turn secretly to the Alcade Major of Vies (a patriot official, still in royal office), and it is worth noting that the Juge(s) de paix (local men appointed by the French) are dealing with all the cases brought to them, however serious, although many among them are wholly illiterate; that of Bascara, for example, is a baker, and yet he is one of those who have reconciled many parties at law. Degerando would observe more than once during his time in the region, as he did in this report to Paris, that: In general, the institution of the Juge(s) de paix is the best received in this region. Yet, they lack education, the judge exequi et boni, and it is urgent to trace out rules of conduct for them that are analogous to those given to the Juge(s) de paix of the Empire.34 There is, indeed, a considerable body of evidence that, once installed early in 1812, the Juge(s) de paix proved very popular in the communities around Girona. It was one of the most successful – perhaps the only successful – French reform in Catalonia that Degerando reported to Paris, exactly because it was seen as a way of freeing disputing parties from the clutches of avaricious lawyers:

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I have seen for myself the good influence the Juge(s) de paix exercise. (The post) is singularly compatible to the habits and spirit of the people of Catalonia. Almost all the disputes between them are settled by conciliation, and there are many cantons in which no cases, up to now, have been brought before the higher courts.35 Degerando must have known that part of their popularity was based as much on an aversion to alien French justice as dispensed by those same higher courts. The French loathed Catalan litigiousness, as will be discussed below, and the powers of out-of-court, informal conciliation the regime entrusted in the Juge(s) de paix were seen as invaluable in a legal culture they felt fostered protracted confrontation, as in Catalonia. Degerando felt these men were well chosen, provided they did not overstep their remit to settle only minor matters, yet this was anything but the case. Just how ‘irregular’ the workings of this popular innovation were can be glimpsed in the perplexed report of the French sub-Prefect of Puigcerda` to his superior, the Prefect of the Serge – admittedly one of the most ephemeral parts of ‘Napoleonic’ Catalonia – in 1813: the Juge(s) de paix were often appealed to for informal conciliation but, although their services were supposed to be free, they charged nominal sums for arbitration, which were then donated faithfully to the local hospice, as had been the rule under the Spanish for minor legal fees. It was something that was, and was not, working.36 Here, too, if for less overtly politicised reasons, the pattern apparent in Roussillon and the Piacentino was reasserting itself: the Juge(s) de paix offered a way around an alien judicial order, especially if tacit advice and judgment could be had from a higher, experienced ancien re´gime source in the Alcade Major of Vies. The success of the Juge(s) de paix indicated without doubt a desperate need for normal justice in this war-torn area. Font y Gauzi, the most prominent noble landowner of canton Hortalrich, in the department of the Ter, wrote to the French Prefect in June, 1812: I have the honour to bring to Your Excellency’s attention, the wish of the communes of my canton to have a Juge de paix here to administer the justice which these people come to ask of me very often.

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Font y Gauzi had already asked about this in a letter of 9 May; having had no reply, he wrote again, ‘. . . and finding myself so often solicited by my subjects, I feel I must reiterate this same request to you, to which I would also add my own feelings to see order and calm re-established’. He also hoped that the authorities would allow him to carry out these duties par interim, until a Juge de paix was appointed.37 From some of the petitions that reached the tribunals, a picture also emerges of individuals, rather than communities, who looked to reconstituted authorities, even if French and alien, to escape the clutches of local elites who had gained a grip on the new handles of power. Early in 1813 a petition reached the Prefect of the Ser, which he passed on to Dergerando and to the public prosecutor of the department’s civil tribunal, from ‘Jean’ Font, a haulier, of Bangolas, whose landlord, the parish priest, was trying to evict him illegally. Font feared going to the Juge de paix, who was the priest’s brother, and hoped that the higher authorities could help him, but was worried he could not afford the costs of justice. The prefect had informed him, correctly, that he was in the right, and it would be dealt with quickly and with minimal expense.38 There are many tales that hang by the plight of ‘Jean’ Font: the office of Juge de paix could be used to further the ends of clannish local cliques, if not properly supervised by higher courts, which found it more difficult to operate than the Juge(s) de paix. It all cut both ways for the French. Here, at least, was one priest not afraid to infiltrate the gobierno intruso, if at one remove, for family ends. Here, too, was an individual, of lower status – a tenant in manual trade – who turned to the new authorities for help. Equally, the breakdown of higher control over the lowest rung of the judicial order could lead to corruption. The need for a proper hierarchy was as clear as it was for accessible local justice that people could understand. There were others like ‘Jean’ Font. Girona produced a Romeo and Juliette for the French to save in April 1813: ‘Andre´’ Sivatte and Ursula Vilar had wanted to marry since 1811, but her father forbade it. He could give no good grounds for this, and Sivatte petitioned the prefect of the Serge to help him, even as the French occupation breathed its last in 1813. Sivatte ‘has no other recourse but to throw myself on your protection’, he told the prefect. He still argued in terms of Catalan law, that the girl’s father could not stand in his way, nor did he grasp that in the new order, he had to go to the civil tribunal, not the head of the

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civil administration, but he needed official help. Parez, the public prosecutor, promised the prefect he would take up the case. To pile irony on irony, the girl had taken refuge from her father in the convent of Beates, which should have been closed by law, but had somehow escaped the gaze of the authorities.39 All of these diverse examples have one important common denominator in their simple desire for some form of legal redress from a source of authority they hoped would treat them fairly. They point to the stark reality that justice, whatever its political source of legitimacy, or its ideological basis, had broken down in the region. A reconstruction was desperately needed, whatever its form. This was the strongest card Degerando possessed. Nor was he alone in these hopes for success in the peninsula. By 1810, Soult had taken Andalusia from the Spanish, and initiated a concerted policy of restoring law and order and a normal civil administration that won the French considerable local support in the region. In Asturias, Boucher’s efforts to portray the guerrillas as merely banditry by another name40 was also finding support among the propertied classes of a once very defiant province. Degerando sought the same results, through broadly the same policy, yet the crucial difference in French policy of Catalonia was that ‘normalisation’ was to be achieved through purely French, civilian, institutions. Degerando’s mission was to apply Napoleonic imperial policy as it had evolved by 1810, through a swift and thoroughgoing implementation of the French judicial system. Only cases currently before the courts were to be dealt with under the Spanish statutes. This approach meant that Catalonia was annexed to France in legal terms, de facto, from the point of the decree of 2 February 1812, which established the French court system, thus removing Catalonia from military rule, and separating it from the rest of Spain.41 Degerando was emphatic from the outset that there was to be no question of gradualism, save for cases already before the courts. This attitude represents a marked shift from the attitude he had endorsed when a member of the Consulta` for the organisation of the Papal States into imperial departments three years earlier. In Rome, Degerando had followed the lead of the Piedmontese magistrate Ferdinando Dal Pozzo in advocating a series of measures which would provide ‘stepping stones’ towards full integration.42 By 1812, Degerando told his superiors that any such steps would only create further confusion for those who had to administer justice, and yet more

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uncertainty and unease for a public desperate for clarity in court and, above all, for political stability. On 19 April 1812 he stressed the need for haste to the Minister of Justice in terms that he would elaborate throughout his mission: The publication of the Penal Code of the Empire would seem to me to be of real benefit for this country, and I do not think it ought to be delayed . . . It will offer (Catalonia) a clearer, more complete, and gentler legislation (than exists at present). It will encompass a greater number of cases than can the Catalan legislation.43 It was no coincidence that Degerando attached so much importance to the swift and wholesale introduction of the Penal Code into so convulsed a region, which had been subject to military justice for so long. The following week, he explained the evolution of his change of mind to the Minister of Justice, which he knew would be new to him after his work in Rome: Your Excellency might be somewhat surprised to see me request the publication of our codes and the organisation of the judicial order in this intendancy when only two arrondissements out of four are occupied (by our forces). I confess that I myself arrived, persuaded that I was best first to observe, and to put back the organisation to a later time. However, having studied the country, and consulted the climate of opinion, I believe that a regular and stable organisation of that part under (our) control, will achieve its submission to us, and will prepare the way for the rest (of Catalonia).44 What he found convinced Degerando that gradualism of any kind was the last thing Catalonia needed in 1812. Nor was he alone. Souques, a Catalan afrancesado who had been appointed a deputy to the Corps Le´gislatif for Orle´ans, supported the abandonment of gradualism wholeheartedly in a letter to the Minister of Justice in 1812, demanding the complete importation of the French system of justice into Catalonia, otherwise no regularity could be hoped for from the courts: ‘Would not, in truth, it be as if one simply placed an elegant, simple, modern portal, in front of a bizarre Gothic monument?’45

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Support of this kind initially convinced Degerando that Catalan opinion was prepared for a decisive, definitive approach to judicial regime change: I have found Catalan opinion better disposed to a (complete) organisation that I had dared hope; the Catalans have been left in a state of prolonged convulsion, and I tell you frankly, they are tired of the provisional organisations of the past four or five years. What is absolutely necessary is something definitive, something clear and stable . . . The spirit which is now driving public administration has already instilled confidence through the manifest effect it is making . . . But it is essential to hurry to profit from this hope, to end the uncertainty and the unfocused fears that come with a new change.46 It would be easy to explain Degerando’s attitude as little more than a cynical attempt to blacken the reputations of his predecessors. However, when his volte-face is set both in the context of the tone of his words to the Minister of Justice, and even more, against that of his record in Rome, Degerando’s quick conversion from a gradualist to an emphatic proponent of holistic, immediate reform, appears genuine and driven by the circumstances of the Girona enclave. This was not playing office politics or simple opportunism, although it was fortunate for the future of his mission that his new views corresponded closely with those emerging at the centre. As his early hopes faded that Catalan opinion would rapidly be appeased by the wholesale reform of their legal world, Degerando became yet more convinced of the need for the swift and complete assimilation of Catalonia into the French system, if for very different reasons.

Degerando’s sociology of the Catalan legal world Joseph-Marie Degerando was one of the Napoleonic regime’s foremost and most formidable intellectuals. Degerando was a moderate revolutionary, drawn from the old Lyonaise bourgeoisie – his father came from a long line of successful architects – and he had been an outspoken advocate of religious equality and freedom of conscience in the early revolution. He fought for the Girondin cause against the

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Jacobin Convention in the ‘Federalist’ revolt of Lyon in 1793, which led to his condemnation to death and temporary exile. He returned to politics under the Directory in 1795, and became a prominent figure in republican intellectual circles in Paris, closely linked to the Ideologues, and an early supporter of the coup of Brumaire, as a close friend of Lucien Bonaparte. From 1805, when he was part of Lebrun’s team sent to effect the annexation of Genoa to France, Degerando became part of a group sent by Napoleon to organise the ever-expanding empire on an inflexible French template. Catalonia was but the last in a long line of missions of this kind: he came to Girona almost directly from a comparable post in Rome. Degerando was steeped in a common view held by most philosophes, that a society’s laws derived from its history, and that they represented its essential character. What he felt he had found in Catalonia was the product of history, and Catalan laws offered a sure window on Catalan society. These perceptions transformed his mission to the region into far more than an attempt to win local support for the new regime by the reestablishment of normal civil administration or the restoration of basic law and order. This is not to say that Joseph, in Madrid or, perhaps even more, Soult in Andalusia, did not seek to implant the values and practices of the Napoleonic regime in the regions they controlled, for they were clear exponents of French reform. Degerando, however, was convinced of the need for a veritable social and cultural revolution in Catalonia; he approached his remit as a philosophe, not as king or a soldier. His was not just a mission to win hearts and minds, still less simply to restore order and then exploit Catalonia. The centrality of the law to any society is expressed emphatically in the context of the need for swift action in a letter to the Minister of Justice on 23 April 1812: I do not know how to stress how important it is, to take into consideration the need to end the state of uncertainty that has been created by the effects of the provisional system which has been followed for the last four years; the good order of this institution (the magistracy) is the most essential for the well being of society; uncertainty has led to the magistracy losing respect, and this is the principle cause of the unease which exists everywhere here; this is what exposes the interests of property owners, and of families to danger, in so many respects; I would add that, in political terms,

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nothing would be more useful than to lay down the cornerstone of all the other institutions of the Empire (the Codes) by announcing to the people of Catalonia, that henceforth, they will live under the rule of law, by giving them this authentic proof of the immutable plans of His Majesty for Catalonia.47 The problem came for Degerando when he began to see that the laws which had governed Catalan society for generations did not conform to his vision of an advanced, enlightened society. Without the French system, Catalonia could never return to stability, because it had never known true stability. His was a mission to civilise, as well as to pacify. The cardinal institutional injustices of the traditional ancien re´gime – seigneurial justice and the feudal rights it protected, alongside the powerful corporate interests of the Church, with is attendant ecclesiastical courts – would simply disappear at a stroke with the publication of the Civil Code and the establishment of the French system of the administration of justice. These two great barriers to progress which had reduced Toma`s Puig to fury only two years before in his report to MacDonald48 were calmly dismissed by Degerando as ‘history’. ‘(T)his matter will sort itself out simply by putting the codes of the Empire into force,’ he told Paris in his report on ecclesiastical justice on 7 March 1812.49 He was equally sure that seigneurial justice would crumble with the abolition of its special courts concomitant on the introduction of the French system; the privileges embodied in Catalan law would evaporate in the face of the statues recently created by the imperial government: The application of the Empire’s anti-feudal legislation to Catalonia will be a simple operation and will work above all, as many motives seem to require, if the principles which serve as the basis of the Decree of 9 December, 1811, for the Hanseatic departments, is extended to this province.50 If it could be done in northern Germany, a bastion of almost mediaeval feudal legal relationships, it could work easily in Catalonia. The first steps of the ‘civilising mission’ in its legal form would, he felt sure, be easy. It would be much harder to uproot the deeper impact of ancien re´gime legal culture on Catalan society, however. Degerando’s concerns

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about the pernicious effects of Catalan statute law and how it was administered reached far beyond the legal classes. The recurring, pervasive fault Degerando found in the Catalan legal world he inherited, and which permeated the whole of Catalan society, was imprecision. From this, it seemed to him, almost all other problems flowed. Imprecision in both statute law and in what Degerando believed to be a court structure which left too much latitude to the lower magistracy, led to an arbitrary attitude to the dispensation of justice which, in turn, produced a legal system and an elite society, prone to act unjustly. Degerando perceived an elite bred to precocity. Disorder stretched back much further than the French invasion of 1808. Imprecision began at the heart of the elite families, and they how they regulated their affairs. Degerando discerned their laws of inheritance as a sign of how far removed from French concepts of the family itself were the Catalan nobility and, therefore, how difficult it would be to mould them to most fundamental precepts of ‘imperial society’: The greatest latitude imaginable has been allowed as regards the deposition of wills in Catalonia. In every case, parents can dispose of the totality of their properties as they wish, save for only onequarter of the total which must be shared equally among all the children, including the nominated heir, however many children there may be . . . The concept of community of property is utterly unknown in Catalonia.51 Nothing could have been further from the maxim at the very heart of the Code Napoleon, which insisted on the equal division of property in the first instance, among all children. Moreover, Catalan wills were secret, and could be changed by aristocratic fathers at any time. ‘Substitutions’ of heirs – he´ritier de confiance – were almost the norm in Catalonia, and were finally abolished by the French by a decree of 11 June 1813. Degerando believed that the secret, unregulated nature of the intentions of the wealthiest people in the province had cost the state very dearly in revenues since the beginning of the war in 1808, because when heads of families emigrated, and died in exile, it was often impossible to know who their heirs were, and by whom death duties were owed.52 This practice was regarded as an abuse by the reforming monarchs of the eighteenth century, and in 1792, Carlos IV had forbidden any new feudal

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bequests – fedicommessi – which might allow such inheritance practices, save by exceptional royal permission. Joseph abolished them in 1808, but this legislation was never applied to Catalonia, and that of Carlos IV seemed to have been ignored. It would take more than the swift implementation of the Code to change the norms of a society based on such principles – or lack of them, in French eyes – but at least it could prevent more wills of this kind being drawn up. Degerando was also struck by what he saw as the peculiar treatment of illegitimate children, ‘natural children’ in the terms of the French Codes. Natural children had no rights at all, other than to food, where there were legitimate heirs. However, what he found remarkable was that, although natural children could not succeed to property, they did succeed to noble title and to the patronage of ecclesiastical benefices. The French had to brace themselves for cases where there was no legitimate heir, but where there would be natural children seeking compensation for the abolition of noble privilege under the Code. Degerando read this as the legal manifestation of a licentious, degenerate elite. Latitude in inheritance laws indicated loose aristocratic morals. Degerando was never emphatic about whether the law reflected moral laxity or whether it created it, but he was sure that the law sustained it, and that the only cure was the short, sharp shock of the Code Napoleon.53 He had conceived an equally poor opinion of the amorality of the Roman nobility, which he had learned from a closer acquaintance from their penchant for exaggerated public piety and the private infidelity prevalent among both sexes.54 In Catalonia, however, largely cut off from direct contact of any kind with the nobility, through a combination of the emigration of so many leading families, and his own relatively isolated position in the provincial backwater of Girona, he deduced his judgements from the study of their legal practices. His faith in the inherent immorality of the Catalan aristocracy led him to suggest one of the few, and by far the most significant alterations to the Code Napoleon imaginable. On 19 April, 1812, he put it to the Minister of Justice, that: Your Exellency can consider . . . if it might be useful to suspend the publication of the clauses (of the Civil Code) relative to divorce, better to control the habits of so very gross a people, who are well disposed to arrive easily at false impressions.55

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Degerando did not counsel gradualism in deference to the sensibilities of an elite culture steeped in Catholicism, or even as an acknowledgement of the damage divorce might do to carefully constructed marriage stratagems, as Joseph had argued – in vain – for his then Kingdom of Naples in 1808.56 Rather, Degerando feared that the ability to shed and acquire spouses at will was exactly what this aristocracy wanted. It was a desire manifest in their traditional approach to inheritance. Paris, however, over ruled Degerando and, in fact, one divorce case was awarded, and the divorce granted, before the Cour d’Appel of Barcelona, in December 1812.57 The social foundations of the Catalan elite were far from promising in Degerando’s eyes. Whatever the source of this degeneracy at the apex of provincial society, Degerando believed it had been nurtured by centuries of weak government, just as it had in the Papal States, in his recent experience. It was a view common among the French everywhere, and the practical results of weak government were imprecision in the law, in civil administration and, inevitably, in the regulation of society’s most basic unit, the family. Catalonia was no exception to a general rule, even if its particular historical experience had left it with certain problems of its own. A weak state had allowed an aggressive Church, thirsty for temporal power, to encroach on the preserve of the civil state: Here, as in the rest of Europe, but more than elsewhere, the ecclesiastical authorities made continual efforts to extend their powers. Here, however, the sovereign only woke up to this rather late, and had to try, through various piecemeal pragmatic legislation, to rein in these incursions.58 The choice of words is revealing. In common with Puig, Degerando saw this as a war, in which the Spanish monarchy was on the back foot from the outset. The introduction of the Code would end this, at a stroke, but it meant Catalonia would have to enter a new world, abruptly. The weakness of the Spanish state had led to the creation of a confused, unordered mass of legislation. Its incoherence and imprecision had long scandalised Puig, who described its net result to MacDonald as ‘a superb arena for legal chicanery and judicial venality’.59 In the Rapport Statistique on his department, the French prefect of the ‘Bouches de

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l’Ebre’ (‘Mouth of the Ebro’) actually included a sub-heading in his analysis of the ancien re´gime judicial system of provincial Catalonia: If any part of society was in need of regeneration in this country, it was probably the administration of justice. The Constitutions of Catalonia strongly reflected the spirit of insubordination which characterise its people, and also the influence exercised by the clergy. On the other hand, the vices of the judicial order were among the principle causes which led to the fall of the Spanish monarchy . . . (through) the venality of the judges in the last years of the reign of Carlos IV . . . Justice was ‘sold’ in almost all the senior courts. Murderers were let off, if they were rich enough to bribe the first judge they were brought before; if a member of the clergy met with severe punishment from his Bishop, he could always turn to the superior courts which, under the pretext of protecting an oppressed innocent person, could do so for corrupt reasons, thus bringing their authority and the respect of individual judges into disrepute. A great number of judgements bear the imprint of corruption. The lower courts sold justice, too, and could be ‘recruited’ by criminals; judges were paid by the parties at law in civil cases. There were regulations to fix costs, but they were not observed any more. The prefect believed Philip V, in the early eighteenth century, had done much to lay the institutional foundations of rational justice in Catalonia, but the weakness of the Spanish state had allowed them to become perverted under his successors.60 Degerando had a more favourable opinion of the first Bourbon in many ways, but he was in no doubt that Philip V had not struck deeply enough at the heart of Catalan legal anarchy. Catalan civil jurisprudence was still based, essentially, on its own constitutions, which had technically been abolished by Philip V in 1716, when the province – theoretically – lost all its privileges. However, the royal legislation, the ‘Pragmatics’, which took their place were equally imprecise, and Catalan judges still turned to the anachronistic Constitutions in practice. They had little choice: given the silence of the Pragmatic (decrees) on (the pertinence of) Roman law and, ultimately, by default, on local customs. A sort of

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series of commentaries emerged from some highly venerated decisions from the time pre-dating the time when the Audiencı´a took over all appeals, that is, when judicial posts were reserved for Castilians (1716).61 They were still in use in 1812, and comprised notes drawn up many centuries previously by senior magistrates and jurisconsultes, and were published in several volumes in 1594; the Catalan Constitutions were last published in 1704, in Catalan. Whereas most cases concerning inheritance followed Roman law, ‘It is worth noting that a great number of important law suits were judged by recourse to canon law, where common law was not applicable.’62 Nothing could have repelled a disciple of codified law more. The administration of civil justice reflected this lack of precision for Degerando. Civil cases began after notification to a court by the defendant, or in a verbal audience with a judge with the two parties present before either a lower magistrate or the alcade, a local official who had both administrative and judicial functions; only they could order a case to proceed, a method which the French felt left far too much discretion to local magistrates. What appalled Degerando most, however, was the almost unlimited ability of both parties to request delays in proceedings, something actually aggravated by Philip V’s reforms; their length was left at the discretion of the judges, with no fixed periods. Neither was a magistrate bound by any deadlines for passing judgment or publishing his sentences; it was at his discretion. This was all soaked in imprecision, with the capacity this left for abuses: This arbitrariness allowed to the judges, this multiplication of formalities (caused by delays), the emergence of so many occurrences in which the real point got lost in many cases; the discussions which all this entailed created so many delays that it led to embarrassment over the moral of the cases. That, in sum, is the form of procedure followed in Catalonia.63 Degerando was doubtless greatly exaggerating this, a probable example of the trend Pedro del Pozo Carrascosa has seen at work in French assessments of Catalan justice.64 Nevertheless, from his own perspective, as the agent of Napoleonic legal reform, he was not wrong to see in the

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system something alien to the one he was charged to create. The Code Napoleon, but also the Code of Civil Procedure, which would curb the powers of local magistrates and remove their discretion over proceedings, was the panacea. It was revealing, in the light of Degerando’s experience of the gradualist approach in the Roman departments a few years previously, that he thought the piecemeal changes introduced earlier – by the French themselves, prompted by Puig – had only created confusion in procedures and in statute law.65 His comments on the criminal law carried many of the same criticims. The methods of procedure left far too much latitude to the local judiciary, for it was left entirely to the lower magistrates, before whom cases came in the first instance, to decide what was sent to the Audiencı´a in Barcelona, and what remained in their own hands: This state of affairs left very great scope for arbitrariness, above all in (relatively) minor offences, where the power of the lower judges was very extensive, and especially where fixing fines was concerned, from which they normally drew a portion. Whether Degerando again exaggerated the ills or not, it drew a remarkable comment from him. He praised the work of the Extraordinary Military Commissions set up by General De Cain in 1811. These courts martial operated under closely prescribed procedures; De Cain ‘determined (the limits of) their competence, and fixed penalties appropriate to the offences’. As a result, Degerando sent all serious criminal cases to the military commissions, in the absence of proper French civilian criminal courts.66 This is quite extraordinary. Everywhere in the convulsed parts of the empire where these courts martial operated, civilian magistrates detested their presence, particularly in the extra-French, newly annexed departments where the military commissions proliferated, civilian commissioners charged with the creation of the French court system were almost universally at odds with them.67 Degerando took an utterly different view. He did so by his own admission because he thought the courts martial, set up by a soldier, were less imprecise and less given to abuse than the judicial traditions of the region. This heritage had left its mark on the Catalan legal classes, for Degerando as it had for Puig. He shared the views of Puig and the prefects that corruption was rife among the Catalan magistracy, but

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Degerando seems to have felt that this was the fault of the system itself, more than any inherent penchant for chicanery among them. Nor did he have any confidence in the members of the senior courts, telling his superiors bluntly that ‘There is not a single member of the judicial order who has the faintest hint of the Codes and laws of the Empire.’68 These men had been too close to a degenerate system, and showed too little interest in the character of the new, to be trusted; their continued presence was to be tolerated out of necessity, no more. Degerando castigated the Catalan lawyers for their avarice, most evident in their widespread use of demanding delays in proceedings to raise their fees. In common with Puig, he loathed their tendency to push clients to go to law, to foster conflict between parties-at-law, mindless of the wider ramifications for social discord they were sowing. All this was evident, he felt, from the success of the institution of the Juge de paix, one of whose great benefits was to keep people out of the hands of the lawyers, and to stem conflicts before they were made worse in court. Yet the French commissioner found far more to praise in their ranks than either the French Prefect of the Bouches de l’Ebre, or Puig, the native reformer. Degerando found higher levels of intelligence and technical competence among the lawyers than in their superiors on the bench: Catalan lawyers were well trained, highly educated, and they knew the law; they worked with precision, however warped by a corrupt legal culture. He did not stint in his praise: the order of advocates was very highly honoured, and honourable, in this country, (as witnessed) by the fact that they enjoyed the same privileges as the nobility, by the manner in which they were examined and received at the bar. From all the information I have been able to gather, the Catalan advocates merited the distinctions they were awarded; the grade, itself, could be purchased, but to do so, a training period of ten years was needed. They were named by the Audiencı´a of Barcelona. Typical of the imprecision of the system they served, however, no actual record of who was accredited had ever been kept by the Audiencı´a. Products of a corrupt ancien re´gime, Degerando felt that, for all their fine qualities, a litigious world had created too many of them.69 Nevertheless, they would have their part to play in a new, regenerated

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order. He was even able to find an exact parallel within the borders of France, in ‘French Catalonia’: ‘Your Excellency is aware that the ancient institutions of Roussilon were held in common with those of Catalonia, and is aware of how highly honoured and honourable the order of advocates was in (Roussillon)’.70 There could be no higher praise from a French imperial official than to see ‘the newly reunited’ as ‘someone like us’. Degerando’s high opinion of the Catalan lawyers, when set beside his dim view of the magistracy, matches those of most French magistrates in the imperial Italian departments, who lamented that the best legal talent could not be coaxed from private practice into public service. In general, they attributed this to the long heritage of weak government that did little to instil a sense of public service in its most talented citizens.71 Equally, Degerando’s belief that this rare repository of educated, technical ability was working against the progress of civilisation, in similar manner to the elite feudal lawyers of the Germany, who used their considerable expertise and formidable intelligence in the service of selfish obfuscation, in defence of the indefensible interests of the former imperial nobility.72 Degerando held an equally high opinion of the Catalan notaries. The notaire was a very important part of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic legal construct; his presence in the smallest, most isolated village was deemed essential to ensure that legal acts were properly and universally registered. The reforming Bourbon monarch, Carlos III, had foreshadowed the French in the importance he accorded this office by his reorganisation of the notaries in 1772, which Degerando compared to the legislation of the Consulate, which created the office in France. The problem with the notaries was not their professional competence, but that their office was regarded by them as feudal privilege which they then considered their private property, following the French abolition of feudal rights. Degerando warned that conflicts would soon arise between notaries and the new government over the status of the records they kept, which people had to pay to consult, unlike the public records of the E´tat civil, as they were in France. This did not diminish their professionalism, for Degerando: The profession of notary enjoys a singular esteem in this country, and it is merited; the corps of notaries, in general, unites

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intelligence and morality; their conduct has been wise and considered in the face of the stormy times this country has been through.73 The posts of notary and official scribe – the greffier – were often synonymous in Catalonia, but not always. They, too, regarded their office as private property, and were allowed by the crown to ‘alienate’ it, to sell it on; thus, acquiring their archives for the state posed real problems of equity and compensation for Degerando. He showed none of the antipathy to them he felt, in common with Puig, towards the nobles themselves. Rather, the greffiers were of ‘estimable families’, and had to be treated fairly and generously, because the French needed their talents.74 There is a symmetry in Degerando’s ‘likes and dislikes’ among the ranks of the Catalan legal classes: the further from the centres of corruption – the courts, themselves – a legal profession was, the higher its quality and the respect it won in wider society. The greffiers and notaries may have been the lackeys of feudalism, but they served a real purpose in society. Their success and livelihoods depended on doing their jobs well for the public. In common with the lawyers, they needed proper professional training, and they set about getting it; the Spanish monarchy in the eighteenth century had facilitated this training, whatever its many other defects as a state. If the lawyers in particular were at the heart of all that Degerando considered rotten in Catalan legal culture, their example drew from him thoughts that set him in the reforming tradition of Turgot who believed that a professional administration, ‘good government’ could foster a wider public morality – civisme – and would cure faults engendered not by human nature but by the corruption of morals endemic in weak states.75 The central importance attached to indigenous laws as the key to understanding a given culture did not imply determinism, still less a fatalistic pessimism, for the powerful agency of the law, if properly reformed, could itself bring about a fundamental change in a society, however debased its laws appeared to enlightened reformers. This belief instilled a reforming zeal in Degerando, a civilising mission, even if it also imbued his aspirations with a degree of caution which admitted, increasingly, that the immediate introduction of root-and-branch reform inaugurated a long, arduous period of transition. His belief that a

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corrupt system had warped and twisted the talents of the lawyers foreshadows, in some degree, his future career as a prison reformer under the July Monarchy. The introduction of the Napoleonic legal system equalled the creation of strong, enlightened government in a region where it was alien, but sorely needed, and the defining characteristic of good government in practice was precision. Precision was ensured, on a routine, working basis by a systematic hierarchy of institutions that did not leave the lower levels of government, judicial or administrative, too much latitude. This was the way strong government worked. It became good government, when its statute law embodied the enlightened mores of the Napoleonic Codes. In Degerando’s mind, he faced not only a literal battle with the Spanish resistance in his enclave, but a struggle with the moral and cultural history of Catalonia. His immediate problem was the former.

Forging the new regime in the Girona-Figueras enclave Degerando faced problems of a great magnitude which often proved intractable when the policy of gradualism was replaced by one of abrupt, complete change, in the Girona-Figueras enclave in 1812. His dogged pursuit of the establishment of an unaltered French system of justice in the region reveals not only an adherence to imperial policy as laid down in Paris, but his genuine belief that a ruthless break with its past was the only way to regenerate Catalan society. The problems inherent in this policy were always obvious to him. His experience in the Roman departments had inured him to many cultural and political obstacles, but central Italy was, at least, militarily secure. In contrast, the continuing threat of invasion by Blake’s regular army and the everpresent danger of the partidas made the most basic steps towards the implantation of the new regime arduous from the start. He confessed to the Minister of Police-General as early as 19 April 1812 that although he knew fine well that corruption was rife among the French officials working in the region, the confused circumstances which engulfed local administration made it all but impossible to prove very much. He made his intention clear to rid his bureaucracy of these ‘left overs’ from the period of military rule, if possible; not one of them, he declared, would have found comparable posts ‘in the interior of the empire’. The serious

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damage the French culture of corruption was doing to their image with public opinion was dangerous: (A)mong the innumerable difficulties (I face), which are almost unparalleled for the organisation of the civil administration of this country, there is one which worries me and shames me more than all the others because it pertains, in essence, to the morality of this administration . . . Nothing matters more for a country under the laws of His Majesty, and especially in a country where it is essential to win over (public) opinion and destroy bad impressions that are, unfortunately, deeply rooted.76 The single most important thing was the moral character of the men who composed the administration who carried the ‘French name’. Degerando admitted that many of the best men currently in office were in fact the Catalans who ‘have endured all the dangers’ of recent years, and deserved recognition, however unfamiliar they were with the new legislation. Degerando clearly intended to purge his enclave of corrupt Frenchmen, just as Augereau, and even more MacDonald, had done with Casanova’s network in Barcelona. The isolated, fragmented and altogether more tenuous grip he had on his region, compared to Barcelona, made it much harder to dispense with their services, even when corruption was rooted out. He was just as clear to Pelet de la Lorze`re, who headed the second section of the Ministry of PoliceGeneral. Degerando had been very dependent on the advice of Pelet’s subordinate, Reouard, the police commissioner of Perpignan, for the first flow of information and background he needed to begin his work.77 His main source of intelligence was not even based in the region. When this is set beside Pelet’s equally direct insistence on the need not only for an investigation of the political reliability of the Catalan magistracy but for a permanent system of surveillance over them,78 the magnitude of gathering intelligence becomes starkly clear. Two things did emerge very clearly, and very soon, in the process, on the one hand, Paris was inflexibly opposed to the slightest deviation from imperial norms of organisation or legislation, while on the other, Degerando was increasingly aware as the summer of 1812 drew on that he had to make important compromises with local circumstances in terms of organisation, if the letter of the French law was to be applied,

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and if the obvious thirst for quick, reliable justice prevalent in the region was to be quenched. In April and May, the Minister of Justice sent Degerando a series of stiff reprimands not only about the imprecision of the work of his Catalan colleagues, but about the need to impose the French system, unaltered, in the region. A clear template for absorbing new territories had been developed at the centre, to cope with the many rapid annexations in the period 1810– 11, and it was going to be applied to Catalonia, unaltered: It will be very easy for you to fulfil this part of your mission, by following the form and, as far as possible, the specific terms, of the decrees issued on 18 October and 8 November, 1810, for the organisation of the departments of Bouches du Rhin, Bouches de l’Escault and for Holland, and especially those clauses of the Imperial Decree of 4 July, 1811, concerning the organisation of the Hanseatic departments. It is indispensable that your work is synchronised with that of M Chauvelin (in Barcelona), since the organisation must be the same for the four departments79 The reference to Chauvelin shows how out of touch with Catalan realities Paris was at this stage, for communications were often impossible on a regular basis between the two enclaves, but the intent was clear: the Grand Empire meant uniformity to almost the last detail. Degerando was in thorough agreement, but he soon saw the yawning chasm between theory and practice in this, the most precarious of the new annexations. Nor was this attitude confined to institutions. On 5 May 1812, the Minister of Justice made it clear to Degerando that there was now an imperial policy to effect the abolition of the tangled, complex problem of feudal rights: The Minister of Finance shares my opinion on the necessity: (1). That there must be only one set of work for the four departments; (2). That the terms of the decree (abolishing feudal rights) must be drawn up on-the-ground to deal with the laws, practices and customs of the region . . . (I)t would be very useful, as regards the feudal system, to relate these (local) practices and customs to each of the terms of the Imperial Decree of 9 December, 1811 concerning the abolition of feudalism in the Hanseatic

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departments. This approach will singularly facilitate your work and you would only have to indicate the useful modifications to this decree, to make it applicable to Catalonia.80 The policy could not be clearer, or more rigid. It also ignored – or, probably, defied – the reality that Catalan ‘feudalism’ was a very different beast to that of northern Germany, just as Paris did not inform Degerando of the problems the application of this decree in the area for which is was originally intended.81 There were common characteristics, in that Catalonia, like northern Germany, had feudal jurisdictions which had to disappear and be absorbed into the state system, with the attendant problems of retrieving their judicial records, yet the fundamental differences were far more important, and required more than ‘useful modifications’ to be effective. Feudalism in northern Germany embraced vast fiefs – one embraced the entire arrondissement of Rees, another, Salm, almost a whole department when the family’s various fiefs were counted together82 – and many feudal rights attached to personal service, often manual labour, which was rare in Catalonia. Broadly, whereas feudal rights in the newly annexed German departments often approximated to real serfdom, Catalan seigneurialism was a mass of specific rights and privileges, few of which embraced personal service. Obligations to carry out labour on the highways, for example, were owed to the crown in Catalonia, whereas in northern Germany, they were owed to a lord; the Catalan nobility had no hunting or fishing reserves, nor did they control marginal or wastelands, which belonged to the crown; all important differences with the Hanseatic departments, Berg or Westphalia. Catalan rights revolved in general around payments for specific legal services and certain kinds of property rents and transfers.83 Degerando was as deeply committed to extirpating the feudal regime he found in Catalonia as his superiors, and as Puig had been, who saw the main problem in the cynical, arbitrary manner in which the seigneurs abused their judicial powers for financial gain.84 The feudalism he confronted was very different, however. Degerando was initially very optimistic about the task, as has been seen. It would entail legal battles the French knew they could win, under the Code. However, before this could come about, courts staffed with reliable judges and public prosecutors, who understood he Code Napoleon well, were needed to confront the seigneurs. This soon proved all but impossible.

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In one of his first reports to Paris, Degerando declared there were only two good legal minds in the province of Girona,85 and his forceful request for as many French magistrates as possible for the region shows he did not really change his opinions very much. The only competent help Degerando could summon came from over the border: Ferrol Lestrude, a former Professsor of Law of the University of Perpignan (which had been abolished early in the Revolution)86 and now a lawyer in Perpignan; he had also been received as an advocate at the Audiencı´a of Barcelona. He had a good grasp of both French and Catalan jurisprudence, and spoke Catalan; he knew the area and the people well. Degerando brought him to Girona, having come to his attention through the authorities in Perpignan, and intended to make him its public prosecutor.87 There was simply no one in the region capable of implementing French legislation. Just as in his need for a ‘French Catalan’ to provide him with basic information, in the form of Reouard, the police commissioner of Perpignan, so he needed another simply to run the tribunals. Another useful presence was Matigo, another lawyer from Perpignan, from a prominent family with his knowledge of Catalan jurisprudence.88 Three days later, he informed Paris in no uncertain terms that there was only one public prosecutor serving all the tribunals of Girona, Parez, and he was in bed with gout, leaving no one with any real grasp of the laws of the empire to help out; not one of his three colleagues had any idea about the new system. Hence the reason why the centre’s decrees had not been put into operation.89 The reply that came from Paris was not just a rebuke about the quality – the lack of precision – in the paperwork of the Catalan public prosecutors, but an inflexible refusal to accept Degerando’s explanation for delaying the introduction of the new legislation: It is incumbent on me to instruct His Majesty not only of the reasons for the delays in the expedition of justice, but also of the manner in which these tribunals fulfil their duties. Thus, it is best that the Public Prosecutor should ensure that these reasons are given with great detail, and that in his letter on this subject, he might give his own views on the conduct and the circumstances of each tribunal.90 The Minister of Justice may have had the botched operation in the Roman departments in his mind, in which Degerando was involved but

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not judged the most guilty, which led to a senior member of the Cour de Cassation being sent to Rome, essentially to undo the work of the Consulta`.91 This is difficult to know with certainty, as Degerando was allowed to continue with his work in Girona, but the tone is one of frustration. What the attitude of Reynier, the Minister of Justice, does show clearly is that he shared Degerando’s low opinion of the talent on offer on the Catalan bench, hinting that even one of the few men Degerando did trust implicitly, Parez, the public prosecutor of Girona, showed the same lack of precision as the majority of Catalans in his reports on the tribunals he supervised. Parisian rigidity did not change the situation confronting Degerando in the slightest, however. On 26 July a letter reached him from the Intendant of Figueras that the prisons were overflowing because of the delays in the judicial system and that this was creating the worst possible impression in the area, a letter Degerando passed on to his superiors in Paris.92 The public prosecutor took matters into his own hands and used ancien re´gime legislation to delegate some of the work of the civil tribunal to a lawyer, who worked closely under the supervision of the greffier.93 There was a local proposal to delegate cases to three of the notaries, which even the local magistrates refused to countenance. One notary had fallen foul of the ancien re´gime bench for insubordination, while the other two had a reputation for dragging out proceedings.94 The views of the afrancesado magistrates of Figueras – the ‘French heartland’ in Catalonia, in so far as one existed – are worthy of reflection first for their low opinion of the notaries, which does not correspond to Degerando’s perception of them as one of the few indigenous sources of professionalism, but equally for the commitment they shared with the French to eradicate a deeply rooted practice to prevaricate at the bar for pecuniary reasons, thus revealing a common interest at a fundamental level. In the far more convulsed region of the Cerdayna, where French control was intermittent at best, Degerando took matters into his own hands and did not hesitate to improvise. In either late July or early August 1812 he issued a decree in the name of the Military Governor of Catalonia that ‘. . . until the establishment of a tribunal of first instance in Puigcerda`, all cases will be brought before a judge-commissioner, specially delegated by this court (the Cour d’Appel of Girona), without appeal’. Probably working in conjunction with Chauvelin, a lawyer

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from Barcelona, Don Vicente Travi, was appointed to this post.95 After the event, Degerando informed Paris of his actions, adding that, although it would have been in keeping with regulations to appoint a Juge de paix from the area to such a post, the only one in the area was widely denounced for his ‘immorality and venality’. Degerando then appointed a new one and a supple´ant – substitute – to help him. He should have had two supple´ants under French regulations, but ‘I have not be able to find a third person who is capable’. He had no choice but to bring in an outsider: ‘. . . in the end, there is not a single jurisconsulte in the area capable of sitting on the bench’.96 He does not seem to have informed Paris that he had suspended the right of appeal to Girona, a measure Degerando may have deemed necessary partly to ease the burden on Girona, but also as a tacit recognition of how ephemeral was the French presence in this plateau in the high Pyrenees.97 These ad hoc arrangements were as anathema to Degerando as to his superiors, but he could not adhere to French norms on so convulsed a frontier. Just how difficult the circumstances were for the French in Catalonia, beyond Barcelona and the Girona-Figueras enclave are brought home forcefully by the experience of the young prefect despatched to try to administer the department of the Serge, based – in theory – around the plateau of the Cerdanya, high in the Pyrenees. The young aristocratic auditeur, Viefville, only 29, could not even enter his chef lieu for eight months because of the guerrillas. It did not end there, however, and Degerando found himself having to cajole him to stay on, even once installed. He had to step well beyond his brief to keep Viefville in his post. Throughout July and August, he pleaded with Degerando to be allowed to remove the prefecture and all other administrative and judicial functions from the area. On the last day of July 1812 he said it was all but impossible to assure the administration of the region, having returned to his post only six weeks before; the area actually under French control amounted to only about 35 or 36 towns and hamlets, with a population only about 8,000 or 9,000.98 A few days later, he described all attempts to ‘administer’ the area as impossible.99 Degerando met these requests with a mixture of commiseration and a ruthless refusal to give in to Viefville. While praising his abilities and expressing his sympathy and friendship, he asserted his authority emphatically:

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The repugnance you have displayed to me, over taking responsibility for affairs which are very grave and difficult – despite the fact that you have all the ability to deal with them well – forced me to employ all the authority that remains to me for this part of my work Degerando reminded the young prefect that he had the authority to keep him in his prefecture, and that he could not appeal over his head to the Governor-General in this matter.100 Reluctantly, Viefville remained, but was adamant that he could not guarantee any real administrative presence in the area, and still felt the prefecture should be evacuated to Girona. He described his position as head of the civil administration in his department as ‘ridiculous’.101 Shortly afterwards, he suffered a nervous breakdown but, refused leave, pulled himself together, and stayed at his post to the end. In the meantime, he paved the streets, built sewers and a hospital, and led armed patrols himself, most nights.102 The confrontation with the young Viefville drew from Degerando a reflection that was made in hope, rather than expectation, but nonetheless expresses his determination to carry out the annexation of Catalonia to the empire, and the deeper commitment he held for so arduous a task: I have had occasion to assure myself that you have, without knowing it, done great, if invisible, good, which is of immense value. The esteem and respect which the people of the Cerdanya have developed for your character, has shown them that they are waiting for French administration to come to them; it is a seed which will bear fruit in time. It is worthy of you to carry on, and to go on making the sacrifices duty imposes on us.103 There was more to their presence than simply imposing control on the frontier; indeed, they carried on without any real level of control at all. For all Degerando’s firmness and belief in his mission, and for all Viefville’s fragile resolve, the fundamental problems of communication and control remained to the end, which makes the evolution of the French judicial system in the Girona enclave difficult to trace. However, even from the fragmentary information Degerando received, a picture emerges of a baffled local magistracy, but one intent on learning the ways

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of the new regime. They were not afraid to ask. In September 1812 Parez, the public prosecutor on Girona’s Cour d’Appel – the senior court in the enclave – and his colleague in Figueras wrote to Degerando with the most basic but involved of requests, simply to tell the magistrates on the lower courts how to handle the administration of cases they wanted to refer to the higher courts. Once they had been told what to do, Parez did not baulk at the prospect of coping with the new system: I am now convinced that we have all that is needed for the gentlemen who compose the tribunals of first instance to take positive notice of this information, and that they will take positive notice of it, for what pertains to the conduct of the public prosecutor; this means that all the work can proceed as it should, certain in the knowledge that all has been done to assure the administration of justice.104 Parez was, obviously, being over optimistic, but the real point remains that he was aware of one of the most important aspects of the role of a senior public prosecutor in newly annexed areas: to instruct those subordinate to him in the new legislation, and to maintain a professional surveillance over them; to teach and police, as it were. Nevertheless, it was equally clear that, in the embattled isolation of the Girona enclave, Degerando – a man, not a body of scholarly reference – was Parez and his colleagues’ only source of guidance, hardly the best basis for professional education. The problem of instilling the concept of a clear division of powers in local officials was common to many parts of the imperial departments, particularly those, like Catalonia, which had been under Habsburg rule in the early modern period, when the basic forms of local government were laid. The insistence on a firm delineation between the magistracy and the civil bureaucracy stood at the heart of the Napoleonic state. This had little relation to Montesquieu’s concept of a ‘balance of powers’, for the Napoleonic state was nothing, if not autocratic. Rather, its purpose was to keep both men and functions apart, even at the most local level: mayors could not be judges, and vice versa. The Spanish alcade or battel, as the office was often known in Catalonia, was the rough equivalent of the Habsburg burgomeister, whose duties combined administrative and judicial functions, and were the bane of French ‘organisers’ like

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Degerando, from Westphalia to Estremadura. In Spain, Catalonia included, this combination of roles in one office was carried to the higher level of districts and provinces, in the office of the corrigedor, ‘the minister for government and justice’. The ancien re´gime may indeed have developed a very clear distinction between the two roles this official had to perform, and avoided confusion between them,105 but the office itself was anathema to the Napoleonic system of government. The French simply had to continue working through corrigedors, even if they put afrancesado into these posts before 1812, but it did not help the office of the Juge de paix, below them, to develop as it should, for the lowest rung of the judicial order often continued to deal with an immediate superior who was alien in concept to the new regime. By early 1813 there were signs that Degerando was starting to staff his new local tribunals in the 400 or so towns and villages the French controlled in the enclave, but even as he did so, it became obvious that the concept of the division of powers, with its interdiction of any duality of office, had not penetrated his local collaborators’ thinking. A series of correspondence with Parez and the new French Intendants reveal that alcades and battels had been appointed to some tribunals, as well as the almost universal problem for the empire, of scribes having to work for both mayors and Juge(s) de paix.106 There was nothing unique about the latter problem, but the former were found more in Spain than elsewhere, it seems. The French ‘way’ made very little impact on the Catalans in this context, but the deeper lesson may be drawn that here, as in so many other parts of the empire, the Habsburg approach to local government was more practical than that developed by the French revolutionaries and carried forward by Napoleon, simply because the Habsburgs accommodated the fundamental, eternal problem of the lack of competent personnel at local level. Nonetheless, the office of corrigedor was being phased out, with the arrival of the French Intendants, and there were strong indications that, had French rule persisted, Degerando may well have been able to realise his hopes of staffing the Catalan courts with Frenchmen in key positions. France was a deep repository of educated talent, with a seemingly endless supply of ambitious men willing to take government service in any part of its empire, even dangerous corners like Catalonia. The language barrier gave the imperial bureaucracy great headaches in its Dutch, German and Italian departments, and put a premium on the services of its Belgian, Lorrainer and Piedmontese subjects, particularly in the

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judicial order, where linguistic competence had to be more than rudimentary. The prospect of four new Catalan departments, with their attendant tribunals, opened a brief window – never opened, because of the collapse of the French war effort – for the ‘French’ Catalans, a trend already presaged by Degerando’s dependence on men from the former University of Perpignan. Typical of them was Arenieoh, an advocate in the Cour Impe´riale of Montpellier, from Perpignan and fluent in Catalan; a widower of 37, he had been educated in Catalan, in the college of Roussillon in his youth, and hoped for advancement in the new tribunals.107 Ambition attracted just the sort of men Degerando had dreamt of, it seemed. Jaubert, the public prosecutor of the civil tribunal of Perpignan, was among those to petition for a place in the new departments, and he was very clear about both his qualifications for the post he wanted, and why he had applied: ‘Accustomed since my youth to the idiom of Catalan,’ he also spoke Castilian – and knew the region well enough not to call it ‘Spanish’ – and the local laws of Catalonia. Above all, ‘I ask only to give new proof of my devotion to His Majesty, on a greater canvas than at present, and in a higher post,’ on the projected Cour Impe´riale of Barcelona, what would have been the highest court in the four new departments.108 The records also show requests from men with no connections to the region, including Piedmontese, Provenc als, and men from all over France – mainly in their twenties – hungry for advancement in an imperial service that, even as late as 1813, with Napoleon in Germany and his Marshals in Spain in full flight, they remained confident would survive and expand, to their profit. As early as May 1812, Degerando was actually expressing reservations about the application of the son of a leading notary of Perpignan, who was bilingual like his father, for a post in Girona: ‘On the one hand, it is indispensable to have a French notary here, capable of drawing up acts in our language . . . On the other, this might start to make the Catalan notaries unhappy.’109 Degerando had seen this before, when the Piedmontese had flooded into the new Roman departments, seizing key jobs at all levels, and antagonising the few precious supporters the French had there.110 It all came to nothing, but had the military situation been different, there was every prospect that there would have been enough Frenchmen willing to staff the new courts. Whether they were able or not, in the eyes of the Minister of Justice or Degerando, can never be known. The day of the ‘French’ Catalans, unlike that of the

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Flemish speaking Belgians, the German speaking Lorrainers, or the Piedmontese, did not dawn. The real lessons of his attempt to assimilate Catalonia into the French Empire for Degerando may have been more directed at himself than to those he sought to turn into Frenchmen. The experience of this alien, embattled enclave, particularly the fundamental nature of the questions posed him by his subordinates, forced him to define clearly for himself what it meant to be a French public servant, and the place of the fonctionnaire in wider civil society. This was his reply to the public prosecutor of the civil tribunal of Girona, to a question – its wording is unknown – that obviously implied the notion that ancien re´gime judicial privilege might also pertain to office in the new regime: It is essential to distinguish between his role as a magistrate in the exercise of his duties, and his individual person, as a citizen, where he being a Juge de paix, or the member of a tribunal, or of the most senior court. He is vested with the attributes of a magistrate when he sits, when he pronounces judgement on a case, but he may never pronounce on a case he is involved in. (In this) he returns to being a simple citizen like every other member of the polity. He enjoys no privileges before the law, and in those cases which are about him, personally, he is only a private person. The legal actions he brings, or which are brought against him, fall under the rules of common procedures.111 This seems straight forward, almost banal, but it is proof of the mountain in sensibilities Degerando had to climb in Catalonia. The experience confronted him with an ancien re´gime mentality the French had long rejected, and he had to return to basics. This was a frontier in more ways than one, and it returned Degerando to the very basic precepts of the new regime.

The mission of Chauvelin in Barcelona Bernard-Franc ois de Chauvelin came from a very different background to Degerando. Chauvelin was the son of a courtier, a marquis who had seen his son made maıˆtre de la garde-robe in the last days of the monarchy; Talleyrand appointed him Louis XVI’s last ambassador to London in

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1792. He left politics during the Terror, but returned under Napoleon to become Prefect of the Lys, the department centred on Brussels. Thus, Chauvelin was a grandee and diplomat, sent to treat with a proud provincial elite. The pairing of a moderate republican to deal with the troubled periphery, and a noble to ‘appease’ the elite of the ancien re´gime centre, had become the preferred method in the process of imperial annexation, as in the despatch in 1810, of Antoine Roederer, the son of one of regime’s leading republican intellectuals, sent to Umbria, and Camille de Tournon, from a very old noble, royalist family, to Rome. Nor could Chauvelin have been in a more different position from that confronting Degerando. In the spring of 1812, his remit amounted to the control of only the four cities of Barcelona, Lerida, Tarragona and Tortosa, all virtually isolated from Degerando, further north. An internal report from the Ministry of Justice to Napoleon in May 1812, actually felt that his position was more exposed than Degerando’s, the supposed reason why Degerando had supplied more complete information to Paris than had Chauvelin.112 In fact, this was not quite the case. Barcelona and the southern cities were far more secure in military terms that most of Degerando’s departments. Southern Catalonia remained well garrisoned late into 1813; Suchet kept 27,000 of his 42,000 troops occupying the cities and smaller strategic points of Chauvelin’s two departments, out of fear of the partidas, but also because he was afraid to evacuate an area he knew Napoleon remained intent on annexing to France. Thus, Lerida and Tortosa actually remained over-garrisoned, while Tarragona was able to withstand a sustained siege by an AngloSicilian expedition in late summer of 1813, and Barcelona – held by 6,400 troops – remained unassailable well into 1814.113 The two French enclaves in Catalonia represented strongly contrasting military situations: the north, around Figueras and Girona, was an extensive but fluctuating zone, where rural areas could be under effective control for long periods, but could suddenly change hands. In the southern zone, by contrast, the countryside was almost wholly and permanently beyond the reach of the French: the major cities were virtual ‘Napoleonic islands’ in a sea of partidas. Translated into the conditions in which the French civilian occupiers of the south operated, Chauvelin and his colleagues were protected by a stronger buffer, for a longer continuous period, than Degerando and his subordinates, who were often beyond the verge of nervous breakdowns.

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Chauvelin had to deal with the most prestigious echelons of the Catalan elite who had either refused to emigrate, or chosen to return at some point during the occupation. Chauvelin chose to work through both groups, in so far as he could, but he was also able to draw upon the French community in the city for his personnel and so, at the outset of his mission, Chauvelin did not hurry to set up new institutions on the French model, unlike Degerando, but to appoint Frenchmen or reliable Catalans to the bodies he found, particularly the Audiencı´a, and to mould their procedures and ethos to those of the French. It was a question of men, not institutions. When the time came to create the new Cour Impe´riale, in 1812, he turned to many of the men of the Audiencı´a, already familiar with French practice. It was not altogether straightforward, however. Whereas Degerando had to cope with an insecure mountain periphery and local elites he could hardly communicate with, Chauvelin was faced with the corrupt, unpopular heritage of a French administration which had wielded almost unbridled control for far too long and left a bitter legacy in its wake. He also had to deal with the senior magistracy of the province, and had to persuade it to work with him. Chauvelin had to deal directly with the complex heritage of Philip V, as well as the problems of his own era. The ambiguous political status of Catalonia since 1810 onwards had a direct impact on Chauvelin’s mission in Barcelona, because it cut the judicial institutions of the province adrift, left in limbo between the higher authorities of Madrid and Paris. This state of affairs had an immediate, pressing influence on the administration of justice, more so than was the case for the civil administration: in 1812, the Audiencı´a had, de facto, become the court of final resort for those parts of the province under French control, because Napoleon had taken Catalonia away from Joseph’s jurisdiction, thus preventing the avenue of appeal to the Council of Castile instituted by Philip V in 1707, while not as yet enabling Catalans to appeal to the Cour de Cassation in Paris. The latter court would become the official court of final resort after the creation of the Cour Impe´riale of Barcelona, later in 1812, but until then, as Chauvelin told Paris in late April 1812, the Audiencı´a was enjoying almost complete independence and real power. Nevertheless, Chauvelin reported that some cases, which by the very fact that they were appealed to the highest courts were extremely serious, were now ‘stuck’ in Madrid, or waiting in Barcelona to go there: the people suffering from this were

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the interested parties, in contrast to the enhanced powers of the senior magistrates of Barcelona.114 Chauvelin had had considerable success through his purge of the afrancesado Audiencı´a after his arrival, not only in uprooting its unsavoury elements, but in attracting some ancien re´gime magistrates back to the bench. The French military successes of these years almost certainly were a deciding influence on this, but it is arguable that a tentative Catalan ralliement was taking place by 1812. This might be seen as part of a wider trend in Josephist Spain; following the conquest of Andalusia by Soult, of Valencia by Suchet, and the successes of Boucher in the Asturias and Leon, signs that local elites were accepting French rule can be seen in all these regions.115 Nevertheless, Chauvelin was very open about the impact emigration had made on staffing the lower courts of Barcelona and the other cities under French control in southern Catalonia: Lerida, Tortosa and Tarragona were practically ‘depopulated’, and the surrounding countryside impenetrable.116 Ralliement was confined to a small, if influential, element of the Barcelona elite. By 1812, Chauvelin had found a niche for this elite in the new French order. The personnel of the short-lived Cour d’Appel, and which would soon become the core of the new Cour Impe´riale, was dominated by Catalan magistrates of the Audiencı´a, the presence of Toma`s Puig as its President notwithstanding.117 A few senior Catalan magistrates, and even more respected lawyers, had survived the upheavals of the war, and crept back into senior posts. If only two members of the Cour d’Appel in 1812 had been senior magistrates under the Bourbons – Josef de Olmo and Juan-Josef de Medinaveita118 – there were many good lawyers, such as Homs, Valenti and its public prosecutor, Verdaquez.119 Chauvelin’s seeming ability to attract successful lawyers to the bench ranks as a rare and genuine success in Napoleonic Europe, for magistrates the length and breadth of the imperial departments decried the low pay and poor conditions which impeded the recruitment of the best legal minds to state service.120 Puig, too, thought well of these men, their ancien re´gime backgrounds notwithstanding, and said openly they were a distinct improvement, in terms of their personal reputations, on what had preceded them.121 These circumstances made Degerando’s stated aim that one-third of all magistrates in the new departments – and especially on the new Cour Impe´riale122 – a French recipe for potential conflict of the kind he had seen in Rome two years before, with the arrival of the

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French and Piedmontese. The flood of applications from ‘French Catalans’ made this all the more likely, but the tides of war consigned this inevitable phase of Napoleonic rule to the realms of the counterfactual. In the higher courts of Barcelona, the looming problem was an ancien re´gime magistracy – or its rump, at least – that was all too well entrenched, in contrast to the lower tribunals of the city or any of the tribunals on the French model created by Degerando in the north. The net result was a return of elements of the old elite, at the very point Chauvelin began to introduce French institutions and published the codes. This was exactly what the regime sought, in theory, but new problems soon arose. One of Chauvelin’s first acts was to translate and publish the French Codes into Catalan, in June 1812.123 At the outset of his mission, he clearly shared Degerando’s view that the ‘language question’ would prove a useful bridge to winning Catalan hearts and minds. This was before he got to know his new adminstre´s better, however. The senior magistrates of Barcelona showed their influence and determination to retain their positions through a shared sense of corporatism, which set them firmly against the most obvious assertion of Catalan cultural separatism: they opposed the use of Catalan for judicial work, and rejected the Catalan translations of the Code Chauvelin had published for their supposed benefit. In November, the commission they created to examine the ‘language question’ under Melchior de Guardia asserted that Castilian had to be retained, and alongside the French had to remain the language of the law, voting for it by nine to one. They argued that Castilian had now taken root as the language of all official business at every level; the Bourbons ‘had omitted nothing’ to ensure that its use spread throughout the province in the preceding century. More than this, Castilian had become the language of literature, the theatre and academic life, to the point that most educated people did not really know Catalan. For too long now, they argued, Castilian had become ‘the language of advancement’ for Catalans, and the legal profession especially, whose mastery of Castilian had been repeated by the Castilians, themselves. Moreover, were Catalan to be introduced, cases would arise where defendants of all kinds would argue that they simply did not understand the letter of the law. Above all, they challenged Puig’s belief that Catalan was sufficiently evolved as a formal language for official use:

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Even in different parts of Catalonia, there are constructions and terms that are not heard outside specific areas . . . Which Catalan dialect should be chosen for the Codes to be translated into? What use are troubadours or the ancient writers who, we confess, we understand only with the greatest difficulty? And when, after extensive research, we have made a good translation of the Code, would it be intelligible to most people? Puig and Degerando put great stress on the fact that the Catalan ‘constitutions’ were in Catalan, but the magistrates of Barcelona had their answer ready to hand: ‘Is the Catalan of our constitutions understood? Can those whose work obliges them to study them understand them easily, or the practices they find compiled there?’ They had had to learn it as part of their professional training, and knew that of which they spoke, came the reply. Nevertheless, the commission never denied how attached Catalans were to their language and their cultural heritage. Their closing comments express openly the lingering, pervasive resentment of subordination to Madrid of which Puig and Degerando made such great play. However high they had risen under the Bourbons, they still felt repressed: If Catalonia were to form an independent state, the Catalan language would be recreated, however difficult the task, to recall the people to its ancient greatness, but since we have not the slightest probability to think this will be the fate of our country, it would be unacceptable to change the language of its tribunals or its legislation, temporarily.124 In these words, however, they expressed – more than tacitly – that they had seen through Degerando’s ‘gradualism’, and that French would engulf them, whichever language they opted for. Castilian was undoubtedly the means by which the judicial elite of Barcelona, and the bureaucracy as a whole, could maintain itself for a time. If they turned their backs on Catalan, it was for pragmatic and probably selfinterested reasons. They saw, however, that the end result was meant to be the same: the monopoly of French in the public sphere. In this, Napoleon and his men were, essentially, the heirs of Philip V, however much they protested the contrary.

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This did not stop Degerando, vociferously, and Chauvelin, through concrete action, from trying to find ways to turn Catalan distaste for government from Madrid, be it Bourbon or Bonaparte, to their advantage. Both hit upon a version of the revival of Catalan as an official language as one way to make French rule, and French law, more attractive to Catalans than the authority of the patriot juntas.125 The Minister of Justice was initially won over by the practical arguments of the Barcelona magistracy, and clearly felt that Degerando had been duped by Puig’s circle: I have grounds to fear that you may have been led into error about the character and usage of the Catalan idiom. Well informed people have assured me that Catalan is only a popular language, and that for a long time, Spanish has been the only language used in public business, and that it is generally understood in Catalonia, even by people of the lower classes.126 Degerando had his reply ready: I have not submitted the idea of using the Catalan language for official business to Your Excellency from a need just to be heard. I have put it forward from purely political reasons . . . Castilian, or Spanish, was only introduced into Catalonia when this province was forced to submit to the general laws of Spain; up to then (1716) it had retained its independence, (but) henceforth, it lost its privileges, and since then, the highest posts of its Magistracy have been reserved for Castilians, and the Catalans were removed from them; the Catalans still have a mournful memory of this, and resent it profoundly; in a word, these changes are seen as a deep humiliation, and a political punishment. The Catalan hates the Spaniard, he does not want to be called ‘Spanish’. These feelings could be very valuable to revive, to seize the moment when His Majesty plans to separate Catalonia from Spain; past memories could be made use of, existing antipathies could make it easier to command opinion, and the choice of the language used for official business is, perhaps, one of the things which could most influence national opinion.127

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Degerando’s own discourse is replete with the sensibilities he, like Augereau before him, had acquired about the Catalan elites: he insisted on saying ‘Castilian’, not ‘Spanish’. He spoke of the Catalans as ‘a nation’, and one with a suppressed history of resentment, which imperial rule could still use, its commitment to uniformity notwithstanding. Language was the key to this, made all the easier because Degerando was convinced, despite the Catalan revival in the form of its first grammars, lexicons and dictionaries,128 that it would, like Dutch, soon disappear as a living language and give way to French. This firmly held supposition made the pragmatic exploitation of the language issue easier to incorporate into otherwise rigid centralism, yet Degerando’s willingness to think in such terms, and the willingness of Paris to entertain such a concession, reveals the emergence of an increasingly pragmatic, if cynical, approach to integration by the regime in the last phase of imperial expansion. It was always clear to Degerando and his superiors that Catalan was an alternative to Castilian, that all official business had to be transacted in French first, and that the use of Catalan was not a substitute for French, but only a ‘halfway house’ to the complete linguistic absorption of Catalonia into France. That Paris subsequently listened to Degerando emerges in the demandes places which followed the news that annexation was imminent and that the new tribunals were to be created, because it was clear to all applicants that a good knowledge of Catalan was regarded as essential by the Ministry of Justice. Nevertheless, the senior magistrates of Barcelona also had pointed to a deeper problem which would have faced the French, had their control of Catalonia endured. Castilian had taken firm root as the language of officialdom and high culture in the course of the century since Philip V had imposed the Nueva Planta on the province with the royal decree of 1718. Unlike Catalan, it was one of the great languages of Europe, and so could not be quickly or easily replaced by French, and its prevalence among the educated elites and at every level of the bureaucracy may soon have forced the French to admit that the process of establishing French would not take place in the foreseeable future. French imperial expansion had taken them into regions such as the Illyrian Provinces, where there was no single established language of administration native to their peoples, which seemed to give them the possibility of fostering the local languages as part of a gradualist policy akin to Degerando’s in Catalonia.129In direct contrast, their annexation of the North Sea coast of

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Germany took them into the heartland of the German-speaking world, where knowledge of another language was not necessary, even for the elites. In 1811, Faure, the French commissioner for justice in the Hansa departments, warned Paris that, although French was spoken in some commercial and intellectual circles in Hamburg, it was unknown beyond the great port, and little used by the magistracy, exactly where competence in it was most needed: Faure was clear that they faced a very long, difficult process of assimilation in the region.130 The problem in Catalonia was that the French never quite decided which sort of region they were dealing with: Degerando agreed with Puig and those around him that Castilian was only the language of an elite minority, and that a revival of Catalan offered a populist window to the new regime, that it was, indeed, the ‘language of the people’, and would be welcomed by a majority long suppressed under the Nueva Planta. The parallels with ‘Illyria’ are clear, and Degerando may well have been encouraged in his ideas by the ready supply of Catalan speakers in Roussillon prepared to seek posts over the border. Indeed, in an ironic contrast to the policy of the Spanish Bourbons, little real effort had been made to supplant Catalan as a learned language under Louis XV or XVI, and the result was de facto linguistic plurality; Catalan probably remained the preferred language of informal written communication in Roussillon, even into the post 1789 period, when French monopolised public business; it remained the language of local justice, practical considerations outweighing ideology under all the revolutionary regimes.131 All this inclined Degerando to support Puig’s revivalism in the immediate circumstances. Opposed to this were the arguments of the senior magistrates of Barcelona, who regarded their province as Castilian speaking for all practicable purposes. The dilemma was laid out very starkly: was Catalonia fish or foul? The empire did not last long enough to find out.

Collaboration and incongruity The spirit of Philip V hung over the French presence in Catalonia. Since the period of Augereau’s governorship and his patronage of Toma`s Puig, the French had sought to profit from their vision of recent Catalan history by exploiting Catalan resentment of Philip V’s destruction of their provincial privileges. Puig had hoped this would result in a loose,

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federal union with France, but the incongruity of such aspirations within so determinedly centralised an empire as Napoleon’s quickly became clear to all. It was not the language used in court which really mattered to the Catalan magistracy in Barcelona, but the letter of the law, as was implicit even in their defence of the use of Castilian. Joan Mercader i Riba has shown in detail that Castilian law succeeded in the province largely because of the patient work of the handful of Catalan jursits present on the Audiencı´a, who carefully adapted and interpreted it in ways suitable to the region.132 Whatever their problems over the language question, Chauvelin made considerable progress in restoring Catalan control of the Audiencı´a, after the purge of the afrancesado administration, even if they were in the service of the French codes. When Degerando set Puig at the head of the new Cour Impe´riale, and Chauvelin surrounded him with as many Catalans as he could muster, they both saw this as a symbolic break with the past: no longer were the highest positions in the province to be the preserve of outsiders, and this was not lost on contemporaries, however out of place Puig actually was among the handful of ancien re´gime rallie´s around him on the court. The Audiencı´a created by the Nueva Planta in 1718 wielded enormous and extensive powers, and the two ministers responsible for Philip V’s organisation advised him to reserve a certain quota of posts in each of its Chambers for Catalans to soften the blow of the loss of their monopoly of office in the province. Philip’s rejection of this advice, on the principle of his retaining his absolute power, became part of Catalan ‘counterhistory’ in the decades that followed, even though by mid century, about half of the Audiencı´a was composed of Catalans, although never in the most senior posts.133 The immient influx of Frenchmen planned by Degerando would have cut short this ‘Catalan spring’, however. Wherever either Bonaparte brother held sway in Spain, however ephemeral their grip, the Napoleonic regime worked in the spirit of Philip V in its drive for centralisation and uniformity, and in that of Carlos III, in its determination to assault the vestiges of privilege. Joseph’s regime, in Madrid, was not afraid to set itself in this tradition,134 but Degerando, Chauvelin and, ultimately, if hesitantly, their superiors in Paris, sought to achieve their goals by a more circuitous route that was based on an imperfect grasp of what they found. The ruthless reform of the municipal government of Barcelona driven through between 1714 and 1718 was not replicated in most of

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the other urban centres of the province. Outside the capital, the traditional elites carried on alongside the new royal corrigedors and intendants, while in Barcelona, the creation of a commercial court and another tribunal for the port in mid century did much to make the dynasty popular, even in the former capital.135 What should have been a warning to the French was the unpopularity among the landed elites and the legal classes of the anti-seigneurial legislation of Pedro III, Alfonso IV, and Carlos III, which Degerando so admired. Noble and professional resistance to royal attempts to regain control of the notarial archives, through legislation which so was fundamentally similar to the French regulations Degerando thought he could use it to get his hands on them, had obviously been ignored: Although this decree is technically a law that is still in force, those who possess the archives (greffes) still have them, up to this very day, probably because the crown did not want to upset the great families, by attacking a genre of property which was subject to a great number of legal transactions. Degerando admitted that when Carlos III and Carlos IV had tried to stand by Alfonso’s decrees, the last time being as recently as 1799, the Catalan magistracy manifested its distaste.136 The writing was on the wall, not just in the archives of the notaries. The return of the old constitutions as the basis of Catalan law would have been the true sign of a new independence, but it was not to be. The French were clear from the outset that their laws would be imposed on the province, substituting one foreign edifice for another, and it was a foreign body of law considerably less mediated than that of the Bourbons. As Pedro del Pozo Carrascosa has pointed out, the civil law in Catalonia since the Nueva Planta was an uneasy juxtaposition of traditional customs which had survived Philip V’s reforms, and a body of Castilian legislation which expanded its scope and reach, in the course of the century. Over time, Catalans became increasingly dependent on the Castilian legislation,137 and on the Council of Castile as their final court of appeal. The Catalans had seen their legal culture eroded, but it had not been swept away, in the manner the French proposed. There were sprigs of hope for Degerando and Chauvelin which are too easily overlooked, however. In its procedures, with the institution of the

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open, public trial and the existence of public prosecutors, the Spanish Bourbons had established mechanisms and offices which were more familiar to the French – as were French procedures and the role of the public prosecutor to the Catalans – than conditions they found in many other parts of their empire, although the overlap of judicial and administrative functions common in Spain was a barrier to the new order. In Tuscany and most of northern Italy, the public trial had been alien and anathema until the coming of the French; the French judicial system was wholly unknown in the heavily feudal regions of northern Germany. At the lowest level of justice, that closest to the people, the Juge(s) de paix were a welcome source of informal justice; it was one important way in which the thirst for justice could be met by a new institution the old order did not provide. Yet, this was also a backhanded return to tradition, for that arbitration was probably not based on French norms. The success of the Juge(s) de paix, but also the deeper problems facing the French in attempting to implant a new judicial order in Catalonia, was present in Barcelona itself, that part of the province most firmly under French control, civil as well as military. Pierre Aldebert, a Belgian merchant who had been persuaded to take a post as one of the four Juge(s) de paix of the city against his better judgement, ‘to the end of reducing the number of cases which were obstructing the courts’, and ‘above all because . . . of the first four men named, two vociferously refused to accept, persuaded that it would be dangerous to give their opinions so openly’. He proudly reported in April 1812 that of the 48 cases brought before him, 27 had been reconciled without going to court. However, he unleashed his wrath on members of the higher magistracy, many of whom rejected or obstructed the process of informal arbitration. His considered opinion was that ancien re´gime habits of procrastination for financial gain persisted; he had made many enemies among them, simply because he was regarded as taking their potential business away through arbitration. As a result, his view of the elite magistracy of the province echoed that of Toma`s Puig; for Aldebert, they were ‘those who live only by often reducing those whose interests they say they defend, to poverty’. This was evidenced by the continuing propensity of Badia, a public prosecutor, to continue practising as a lawyer, which was not allowed in the French system – ‘these same magistrates have tried to unite their former jobs to those which have been bestowed on them since their

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elevation to the magistracy’, he told Chauvelin – and by using his official greffier in private actions, one such notably against Aldebert himself, over a case concerning Badia, which the Juge de paix had tried to arbitrate.138 For his part, Badia showed his ignorance of the new system, arguing that he had every right, as a lawyer, to plead if he chose; his father, he added with incongruity, had been a royal notary and a public prosecutor, a genre of defence that had no place in the new order.139 The deeper problem for the French was that a foreign Juge de paix understood the system better than the legal elite of the capital of their new province, and that their sense of hereditary entitlement to exercise their private profession and their traditional sources of income, while in public office, would take an age to uproot. This, it should be remembered, was a problem among the rallie´s. It did not emerge from resistance to the French, but from attempted collaboration. The military situation made dead letters of the most important elements of Napoleonic anti-feudal legislation, and even attempts to establish the Enregistrement, the obligation to register all transactions and legal business with the civil authorities, were subject to the fluctuations of war against the partidas in the Girona enclave. The absence of officially stamped paper in a given area, and the inability of local officials to distribute it, were signs that this basic component of the new regime had been grasped even in remote areas. Equally, however, as the Juge de paix of Hortalrich told the public prosecutor of Girona in April 1813 – as the occupation collapsed around them – that the withdrawal of the French troops had led to the population refusing to come to town to do business; that the tribunal had also fled, and that this kind of essential administration could simply not continue, as the tribunal had taken all the official paper with it.140 This almost absurd example of the manner in which petty officialdom viewed the collapse of the regime reveals the extent to which the Napoleonic state depended on basic law and order to function, because of its own ordered, bureaucratic nature, just as it shows the way in which a local official interpreted its demise: without a higher authority to direct him, he gave up, either awaiting the return of his superiors or, more probable in the circumstances, by portraying to the patriot authorities his inability to act as a Juge de paix as a deliberate act of resistance. By the spring of 1813, it was clear that all the French could hope for in Catalonia was a degree of pure military control. For financial reasons,

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Degerando’s mission was terminated in that month; he returned to France, and Chauvelin was left as the only civilian commissioner in the province. Early in 1814, Chauvelin withdrew to Girona, as Barcelona prepared for a siege and, for all practical purposes, came under a martial law that became ever more ruthless and paranoid. Hundreds of afrancesado followed the French retreat to the frontier, in justifiable fear of what awaited them in the wake of a patriot victory.141 Suchet had grouped his troops carefully together, and fallen back on Girona and then Figueras, from which he withdrew on news of Napoleon’s abdication; many afrancesado went with him. An armistice was finally agreed on 19 April, and the French garrison departed on 28 May, by ship, but the experiment in annexation had collapsed over a year before.142 The work for the annexation of Catalonia was the last such process undertaken by the Napoleonic regime, and left little discernible trace on the province. The experience of Napoleonic rule resurfaced gradually in the 1820s at the apex of the Spanish state, and emerged fully fledged immediately after the death of Ferdinand VII – and at his posthumous behest – under the regency of Maria-Christina, in the 1830s. Nevertheless, the experience sheds significant light on how the thinking of a generation of French imperial administrators had evolved by the last years of the empire, and as an example of the reactions of a Mediterranean region to their attempts to substitute one form of government for another. There were traits, almost pathologies, which persisted among the French commissioners, which had been present from the outset of imperial expansion, and endured to the end. Degerando, especially, retained the instinctive reaction to a foreign society to search out and trust only those elements in it which he believed corresponded most to his own. Chauvelin remained a practitioner of the oldest of Napoleonic policies, ralliement and, up to a point, of amalgame, in that he deliberately recruited and sustained in office as many magistrates from the Audiencı´a as were willing to collaborate. This entailed the expulsion of most of the afrancesado he found in office, in Barcelona, hardly compatible with the ethos of amalgame as it was first conceived, but the appointment of Toma`s Puig to the most senior post on the Cour Impe´riale was an important gesture to provincial collaborators. Within these almost reflexive responses to the tasks before them were signs of a new ethos

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emerging within the Napoleonic administrative cadres: Degerando praised the Catalan notariate and the order of advocates, while Chauvelin sought to recruit the latter to the judiciary, because of their perception of them as highly professional and well educated, their corrupt practices, proven resistance to reform under the Bourbons, and their close links to the landed nobility notwithstanding. Likewise, Chauvelin sought out the ancien re´gime magistrates for their professional competence and their good reputations with the public, not for their social cachet or personal wealth. The signs were that Degerando’s and Chauvelin’s perceptions and hopes may have been misplaced, but what emerges is a frame of mind shared by the commissioners, who were from very different backgrounds, that professional competence and education were what made new subjects desirable, and what made them correspond to their notions of their own self-image. This was an imperial bureaucracy for which these attributes had become paramount. There is something deeper in the responses of Degerando, and of Chuavelin, more implicitly, to the Catalan magistracy which reflects their belief in the Napoleonic ‘mission’. This was not merely, or even primarily, a civilising mission to the backward peasantry of the Catalan periphery, or solely an attempt to uproot religious superstition and aristocratic privilege, per se. It was, in the first instance, a mission of regeneration, of reviving a fallen elite, rescuing it from the decadence it had fallen into, as well as bringing light to the dark places of the Pyrenean valleys. The French commissioners saw great ability, intelligence and high levels of a professional expertise all around them in the Catalan legal classes. Nevertheless, they also saw them as deeply corrupt; these intelligent men used their good educations and considerable expertise in the service of a rotten system: its ethos was based on laws of inheritance which warped the very heart of the private sphere; its mechanisms were predicated on litigiousness that turned lawyers and magistrates into bloodsuckers, not public servants. The wider mission to the Catalan people was in the letter of the law, in the firm belief that clear, rational legal codes would, in the longue dure´e, bring Catalan society into the fold of enlightened societies. Degerando never doubted the magnitude of this task, nor that it could not be achieved quickly. However, the introduction of French procedures, of a court system with a proper hierarchy that left little latitude for corruption at local level, which clearly demarcated the civil from the

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judicial, and that actively discouraged litigiousness, would eventually transform these men into useful, valued servants of a society still in the process of regeneration. The projected presence of Catalan speaking French magistrates among them, in the key roles of presidents, and even more, of public prosecutors, part of whose official function was ‘to educate the court and maintain its internal discipline’, was meant to engender this regeneration. French policy towards the legal profession in Catalonia turned on redeeming wasted talent. To this end, French norms had to be introduced, unaltered, from the outset. To do otherwise would serve only to prolong the ill. As in so many other parts of their empire, the French on the ground emerge as proponents of that strand of enlightened thought most readily associated with Voltaire or David Hume, that good government could mould a society, in the face of deep seated decadence, and could triumph over environmental determinism. After his time in Rome, Degerando had learned that this was no easy task, and that a concession over language – in the particular circumstances of Catalonia – might be worth making. However, the real road to regeneration came through institutions and, above all, through law. To this end, he was prepared to risk the same bad feelings and the emergence of the same resentments in Catalonia which he had created in the Roman departments by the introduction of outsiders into the key posts of the judicial system. The short-term resentment was necessary if the regenerating power of the law, properly administered, was to be felt throughout society as a whole, and within the legal classes. The law, and how it worked, was the key to regeneration. In this respect, the judgement of Pedro del Pozo Carrascosa is beyond contradiction when he states that ‘In this case, the immediate imposition of a determined objective, the introduction of the law, constitutes the lynch pin of a wider program which the conqueror wishes to achieve.’143 The fundamental determination to impose the edifice of the Napoleonic legal system upon any society under the direct rule of Paris did not alter, to the end, regardless of whether it was conditioned to accept it, or not. Means may have become less dogmatic; the ends had not.

5 THE NAPOLEONIC JUDICIAL SYSTEM IN THE ILLYRIAN PROVINCES, 1809—13: AN EXERCISE IN INCONGRUITY?1

‘I

llyria’ was the farthest-flung component of the first Napoleonic empire, even if it was not the last imperial acquisition. That dubious privilege belonged to the four ‘shadow’ departments of Catalonia, where the process of annexation began in 1812, several years after the provisional incorporation of the Illyrian provinces under direct rule from Paris. Nevertheless, nowhere else in the ‘Grand Empire’ was further geographically or culturally from the French imperial core than ‘Illyria’. These heterogeneous territories proved ‘alien territory’ for the French, in every sense, yet imperial ideology insisted on the complete application there of the laws of the empire, embodied by the Civil and Criminal Codes and the French system of judicial administration. Thus, the experience of the Illyrian Provinces exemplifies the Napoleonic obsession with the imposition of uniformity on diversity. The imposition of the French legal edifice on ‘Illyria’ had two aspects to it: on one level, the nature of this new system was equally alien to every part of the new provinces; no corner of ‘Illyria’ had any previous experience of a legal order remotely like that of Napoleonic France. On another, the task of imposing legal unity was undertaken in regions whose ancien re´gimes had been very different from each other, for the former Venetian territories of the Dalmatian coast and the Habsburg

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lands of the ‘Illyrian’ interior had little in common in their institutional histories. The task the French set themselves reached far beyond simply substituting one system for another, however alien that system was. Rather, they had to get local magistrates and elites, more generally, to work together who had little in common themselves. It never occurred to the French to abandon their ideological commitment to legal uniformity, even in the face of the intrinsic incongruity that was their Illyrian march. Nevertheless, by the time the French entered ‘Illyria’, they had acquired almost two decades of experience as imperial expansionists and administrators. As was sometimes the case in Catalonia, in the same years, the thoughts of the French on the ground in ‘Illyria’ and, perhaps even more, in Paris, showed many signs of an imperial regime that was maturing and more attuned to compromise with certain local conditions. Pragmatism was more evident in some aspects of the French approach to ‘Illyria’ than had hitherto been the case in the nonFrench parts of the empire. However, such attitudes always remained specific, pragmatic concessions to the glaring incongruities with which the new rulers were confronted, and they were regarded as purely temporary expedients, halfway houses to complete assimilation into the imperial norm. Yet, the very existence of such relative flexibility is not insignificant, particularly when set in the chronological context of the late empire, when the experience of imperialism was beginning to be garnered by a new generation of imperial administrators. These green sprigs of pragmatism notwithstanding, what stands out remains the determination of the French to adhere to their cherished concept of ‘one state, one law’, and their unshakeable belief in the superiority of their own legal system. This attitude is all the more striking when the ambiguous diplomatic status of the Illyrian Provinces is remembered: they were always considered a bargaining chip in Napoleon’s relations with the Habsburgs, and the possibility of their ultimate exchange for other concessions elsewhere was always possible in the years of French direct rule between 1809 and 1814. That so much energy, money and ideological commitment should be expended on a provisional occupation is extraordinary, all the more so when the problems that it entailed are examined in detail. The territories of ‘Illyria’ were typical of almost every geographical typology of the western Mediterranean in one part of the new imperial

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provinces or other. Once lumped together under Napoleonic rule, they were close to forming a microcosm of the major characteristics of a wider macro-region, ‘the Napoleonic Mediterranean’, in terms of both physical and human geography, and the political cultures generated by this. The Adriatic littoral, dotted with small islands and dominated by wellestablished maritime ports, the chief of which were Cattaro (modern Kotor) and the largest of the port cities, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), which were both the independent city states whose urban, maritime cultures were deeply influenced by Venice. Fernand Braudel pointed directly to this in his seminal study of the early modern Mediterranean. For Braudel, the Adriatic was ‘perhaps the most unified of all the regions of the sea’, ‘a homogenous world’,2 all its coastlines hemmed in by mountains, with a narrow channel to the south. Thus, its coastal regions were susceptible to imperial domination, for the three sides of the Adriatic could be mastered, given their geography. Until it crumbled under the wheels of the Napoleonic juggernaut in 1797, the Republic of Venice had exerted considerable political control over the Adriatic, although it had long since ceased to be the Republic’s ‘lake’. Venetian cultural hegemony was more pervasive and enduring than its political or military sway, however. The human cultural unity of the gulf had a predominantly ‘Italian flavour’. The sons of its elites were educated in Padua and other Italian centres, and the influence of Italian civilisation ‘wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea’.3 This cultural heritage provided the French with one of the few openings they found to the elites of the region, yet the political culture of Venice, which dominated the public sphere of the independent city states of Trieste, in the recent past, and Ragusa, at the moment of annexation, proved a poisoned chalice, for there were few European polities whose ethos was further removed from that of the Napoleonic empire than that of the Republic of St Mark. The Adriatic coast possessed a mountainous hinterland, the Dinaric Alps, utterly different from the commercial, urbanised coast. In common with so much of the western Mediterranean, even the communities of the valleys relatively near the coastal centres had little in common with these ports, and the convulsed circumstances of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period revealed how much antipathy existed between them. The upheavals of war, invasion and economic dislocation brought to the surface an almost atavistic fear of the capacity of the mountain for pillage

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and violence which was tangible within the port cities. Conversely, the fear of political domination and exploitation of the valleys by the cities exploded among these poor communities. The economies of the valleys were based on a subsistence agriculture hampered by poor soil, on transhumance and on a localised transport trade that all too easily shaded into banditry; they were notably over-populated by the end of the eighteenth century, yet they were closely bound to the urban centres through an economy that amounted to the exploitation of the coastal valleys by the cities, and by ties of patron–client relations. These relationships and the tensions they generated had existed for centuries, but the traumas of the wars of the late 1790s intensified them. The ‘revolutionary decade’ brought the latent animosities of Dalmatia to breaking point, the furthest flung, but among the most violent ripples of the revolutionary tide which began in France. The Dinaric Alps come down very close to the Adriatic coast, but their watershed was a genuine cleavage between the civilisation of the Adriatic gulf and that of the Balkan plateaux. The Habsburg lands, Austrian and Hungarian, lay beyond the coastal ranges, and belonged to another Mediterranean. Areas of intense agriculture, seafaring economies and urban settlement gave way abruptly to a world of dispersed settlement, devoid of fertile soil or ready access to external influences. This is not to say that the lands beyond the watershed were in any manner homogeneous, and their different political pasts compounded this. The former Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Carinola had experienced the intense administrative reforms initiated by Joseph II in the 1780s which, although they had largely failed, had left a considerable influence on the elites of these areas upon which the French could draw. In direct contrast, the Josephine reforms had not embraced the lands of the Hungarian crown, those of ‘Hungarian Croatia’ which became part of ‘Illyria’ after 1809. The Austrian, Hungarian and Venetian ancien re´gimes had one trait in common: their weak control over their territories in Dalmatia, Croatia and, to a lesser extent, in inland parts of Slovenia. All of them were ephemeral presences in their Balkan enclaves. The French attempted to reverse this traditional weakness not just by the imposition of a powerful, coercive presence, but through institutional uniformity. The physical diversity of the territories which became ‘Illyria’ naturally produced diverse societies, and thus different legal cultures. Local conditions

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forged socio-economic systems and political cultures that, however proximate to each other geographically, had different administrative needs, and little in common. The French chose to confront this diversity directly, at every turn. The name ‘Illyria’ itself smacks of official desperation in the face of an artificially created amalgamation: it conforms to a penchant for classical nomenclature which began with the revolutionary regimes of the 1790s, and gave birth to the Helvetic, Cisalpine, and Batavian Republics, among its longer-lived creations. In classical historiography, in which the French imperialists were steeped, ‘Illyria’ was an ill-defined ‘barbarian’ zone of non-Greek speakers to the north of Hellas, and later a Roman province, but even these hazy precedents bore only a partial geographical resemblance to the territories which became part of the French Empire in 1809. The closest to uniformity the Illyrian Provinces might be said to have reached is a broad, if hardly comprehensive, division into two blocks, ‘Venetian’ and ‘Habsburg’, defined by their experiences under the ancien re´gime, yet even this is subject to important qualifications. Not only were there significant enclaves of independent polities within the two ‘blocks’, but the nature of both ancien re´gimes, Habsburg and Venetian, ensured that diversity rooted in topography and urban autonomy were the hallmarks of these outlying regions of both empires. The French organisation of their new acquisition reflected these older divisions, even if imperial administrative culture sought to obliterate ancien re´gime diversity through uniform institutions. The 250,000 ‘Dalmatians’ of the former Venetian province, plus Ragusa, were now added to the more populous Habsburg provinces, bringing the total population of the Illyrian Provinces to 2,500,000 in 1810. The French subdivided Illyria into six provinces – they did not adopt their own nomenclature of departments – each run by an Intendant, a prefect in all but name. Carinthia, Carinola, and Civil Croatia had all been under the Austrian side of the Habsburg Monarchy. Military Croatia had been under the Hungarian crown, but was now amalgamated by the French with Dalmatia, formerly part of the Venetian empire, and then under Austrian rule for the decade 1797– 1807, and subsequently an appendage of the Kingdom of Italy. When the city state of Ragusa lost its independence in 1809, the French attached it to Cattaro, as one province. Istria, centred on Trieste, had been part of the Kingdom of Italy much longer than the rest of Illyria, a historical fact that led the

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French to seek a disproportionate number of potential public officials there. Taken together, the French reorganisation reinforced the ancien re´gime territorial division between Austrian Habsburg and Venetian spheres of influence and governance, on the one hand, while aggressively undermining the pre-imperial status quo in the former Venetian territories: Hungarian, semi-feudal Military Croatia, conceived as a buffer with the Ottomans, was thrown together with the Dalmatian littoral, in a striking exercise in incongruity, while Ragusa’s loss of independence was reinforced by its amalgamation with Cattaro, when it might have been left as a self-contained administrative unit, within the empire. In contrast, the territorial integrity of the former Austrian provinces was maintained, as was that of Istria. The whole was administered by a governor-general, first based in the coastal city of Zara, then inland, in Laybach (modern Ljubljana), a reflection of the extent to which the amalgamation of these territories had created a new centre of power, by force of population and economic prosperity, rooted inland, in the former Austrian sector, away from the older coastal cities. In most of Dalmatia, including Ragusa, the official language, for administrative and judicial purposes, was Italian. The former Habsburg territories, amalgamated to Dalmatia in 1809, which had belonged to the Hungarian crown, worked in Latin or German, while the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Carinola used German. The languages of most people, even within the elites, were Slovenian and Croatian, but they had yet to acquire the structures that would allow them to be used for formal purposes, and had no official status under either the Habsburgs or the Venetians, nor even in Ragusa. The French gave important impetus to the development of the Slavonic languages in cultural terms, even if they failed to note the differences between Croatian and Slovenian, believing them to be the same language. However, they saw clearly that the indigenous languages were not yet developed enough to be used in the public sphere.4 One of the original aspirations of the legal reforms of the French Revolution was to make the law accessible and comprehensible to all citizens, and these hopes persisted among the compilers of the Napoleonic Civil Code: French law was to be set out in plain language, in a concise, easily understood framework, a written code, which everyone, not just a specialist elite of experts, was free to examine. ‘Illyria’ provided the ultimate challenge for the realisation of such hopes.

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Nowhere was ‘Illyrian’ diversity – official, cultural, environmental – more evident than in the realm of the law, and it deeply conditioned the responses of the Illyrian Provinces to the introduction of the French legal system. The bedrock of the French Civil Code was the abolition of feudalism as a prelude to the institution of equality before the law and of the concept of private property as the cornerstone of civil society, yet feudalism dominated the social and economic structures of many parts of the Illyrian Provinces. Moreover, the administration of justice under the French was constructed on the geographic assumption of the existence of urban centres spread more or less evenly over a given region, a configuration which did not prevail over most of the provinces, beyond the Dalmatian coast. The Code had been created within the context of a physically stable, immobile society; this was not the norm among many of the peoples of the Croatian interior, commonly called Morlaques by the French and other Western observers,5 whose pastoral economy struck the French as semi-nomadic. Vincenzo Dandolo, the Italian intellectual chosen by Napoleon to govern Dalmatia between 1807 and 1809, when it formed part of the Kingdom of Italy, was far from reluctant to impose the essence of Napoleonic reforms on the region, particularly in matters of civil administration, urban improvements and the restoration of order. Nevertheless, Dandolo was of the opinion that the imposition of any form of a unified legal code on Dalmatia would take a very long time, and he did not attempt to introduce the Italian Civil Code, its system of court administration or the Code of Civil Procedure of the Kingdom of Italy in Dalmatia, all of which were closely modelled on those of France.6 Dandolo’s tenure of office was marked by rivalry with the military commander of Dalmatia, Marshal Marmont, the Duke of Ragusa, but they shared the view that Dalmatia was not ready for the wholesale imposition of the Napoleonic legal system. By 1809, when Dalmatia and the other, still more diverse regions of Croatia and Slovenia were annexed directly to the empire, this gradualist approach had been abandoned by the regime.

The French mission, 1809 –13 When Napoleon appointed Joseph Coffinhal-Dunoyer to oversee the creation of the French legal system in the Illyrian Provinces in 1811,

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it was a clear sign he would accept no significant compromises. If any imperial magistrate incarnated unflinching adherence to the letter of the law, it was Coffinhal. He had made almost his entire legal career since the Revolution on the Cour de Cassation in Paris, which he joined in 1795. Thus, he had a long training in adjudicating questions of procedure and enforcing standards of conduct in the ranks of the magistracy.7 Coffinhal arrived fresh from a ruthless inspection of the new Roman departments where, between 1810 and 1811, he had pilloried, purged and reversed the initial work of the provisional Napoleonic government of Rome, the Consulta`. His comprehensive, often acerbic criticism of the original architect of the French judicial order in Rome, the Piedmontese, Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, for the imprecision of his work, and his failure to adhere to French norms,8 soon found an echo in his distaste for what he found in ‘Illyria’. Dandolo’s work fell far short of the standards Coffinhal demanded, and he was quick to tell his superiors about it. In a very direct letter to the Minister of Justice in October, 1811, Coffinhal said simply that the current organisation of the courts made it impossible introduce the French Criminal Code or its Code of Procedure. The basic principle, that a number of magistrates had to be present to decide if a case was of a criminal nature was not in force, nor was the role of the public prosecutor properly defined. He set to work immediately, issuing a series of decrees to bring procedures into line with the rest of the empire, to prepare the way for the publication of the Criminal Code. Although Dandolo was not mentioned by name, Coffinhal’s view of his work as inadequate was obvious.9 As late as 1812, as Coffinhal dug deeper into the administration of justice in ‘Illyria’, he was still finding fault with some of Dandolo’s basic reforms, as when he told Paris that it was increasingly obvious that one of the most fundamental elements of the French system, the regulations governing notaries – the local officers responsible for the registration of all legal acts – simply did not correspond to French law, a state of affairs which impeded the creation of the new order at the very base of society.10 The longer Coffinhal remained in the provinces – he did not leave his post until the general evacuation of all the French in the autumn of 1813 – the more irregularities he felt he discovered, as he had in Rome. This contempt for Dandolo’s work reveals the uncompromising attitude of Coffinhal and the regime he served, perhaps as much as the inadequacies of Dandolo’s approach to introducing Napoleonic rule to a region even Coffinhal agreed was far from prepared for reform of this

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kind, to say nothing of the sudden, all-embracing manner of its implementation. Coffinhal’s persistent criticism of Dandolo’s work was not based on any sense of rivalry, unlike the sources of many of the conflicts between Marmont and Dandolo in the years prior to annexation. Coffinhal’s dissatisfaction with the reforms enacted under Italian rule had nothing to do with personal or political considerations. They were the manifestation of a regime which was hardening in its approach to ruling an ever more diverse empire. In the face of ever more unpromising local conditions, Coffinhal felt that it was all the more essential to apply the strict letter of the law. He had a Gargantuan struggle before him.

The French administration of justice: The war on geography Geography was a formidable obstacle to the establishment of both judicial and civil administration on the French model, perhaps more pervasively than anywhere else in the empire. The varied topography and the patterns of settlement it engendered militated against French norms in many parts of ‘Illyria’. Few other parts of the empire underline so emphatically the assertion that the Napoleonic empire was, fundamentally, an ‘empire of the towns’.11 This was not because the regime sought to ignore the countryside in the manner of so many weak ancien re´gime states. Indeed, the reverse was true; the existence of the gendarmerie alone testifies to its determination to assert control where previous rulers had never sought to tread. Rather, the mixed experience of trying to administer ‘Illyria’ as part of Napoleonic France reveals starkly the basic fact that imperial administration radiated outwards from urban centres, and depended heavily on educated cadres, as opposed to economic, social or even political elites, to control its carefully constructed hierarchal structures. The introduction of French administrative and judicial structures on the Dalmatian coast met with many problems, but physical geography was not a significant obstacle on the littoral, whereas the islands proved all but impossible to govern. The coastline conformed to a wider Mediterranean pattern, with its relatively large towns, populated by multilingual professional, commercial and legal bourgeoisies, and with ample public buildings to accommodate the higher and middling levels of the French courts. There were cultural, political and linguistic problems aplenty, but the basic structures needed for the new

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institutions existed. Put simply, courts could be set up and staffed, even if the language they had to work in and the character of their procedures and statutes were quite another matter. Although geography was a serious impediment to exerting tight control over the hinterland of the Dinaric Alps, this often had more to do with the proximity of international borders with Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire, than with the mountainous terrain, for city and mountain existed cheek-byjowl here, as so often the case in the western Mediterranean. The islands proved too scattered and numerous for the French to establish any real control, however, not just because of the presence of a British sea power they could not hope to expel, but due to geography itself. Hierarchical institutional control, as epitomised by the court structures that ran from regional Appeal Courts, through the tribunals of first instance in the arrondissement capitals – the rung of civil administration immediately below the department – down to the justices of the peace, in the cantons – depended on a constant flow of information and instruction, from top to bottom. This did not just apply to cases which had to be appealed up the judicial ladder, although a flow of information and command was essential if the senior courts were even to be made aware of such cases. It also pertained to the imposition of routine discipline on the lower magistracy by their superiors: this was a hallmark of the French system; its integrated hierarchy of courts and command had been created specifically to prevent too great an independence among the lower rungs of the judiciary, itself an essential prerequisite for the regime’s ideological commitment to creating a uniform system of justice for the whole empire. Mainland Dalmatia was the only part of the Illyrian Provinces where settlement patterns made this immediately feasible, at least at the most fundamental level of being able to set up courts and supervise them. The former Austrian provinces of the Alpine regions of modern Slovenia, centred on Laybach (Ljubljana), proved the best source of competent personnel, yet the geography of the region proved a powerful obstacle for the creation of courts. In one of many frank letters to the Ministry of Justice in Paris, Coffinhal set out his dilemma starkly. There was, he argued, only one real town in the whole of Carinola, Laybach, its capital, and it was difficult to put a tribunal anywhere else, because no town had a population of more than 3,000 outside Laybach. The Bulletin des Lois, which was essential reading for all magistrates and lawyers, was

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not getting through to Illyria, and just keeping the lines of correspondence open to Paris proved hard, all of which was detrimental to the administration of justice.12 A particularly striking case of this surrounded the problems of creating a tribunal at Neustadt. Neither the Governor-General nor Coffinhal thought this was feasible, simply because the town was too small to accommodate it. Coffinhal considered it a mere village, where everything would have to be created from scratch; its President would have to be selected from the Laybach courts, and it would be very hard to persuade anyone to go there, ‘for I would be obliged to send a president (of the court) from here (Laybach) who would only go there after much difficulty . . . and where we would find neither judges nor lawyers’.13 This is all the more striking because it concerns Carinola, a former Austrian province the French considered far from uncivilised, yet geography still militated against their system, in practical ways. The Governor-General was probably more emphatic than he intended, when he underlined the fundamental problems of simply establishing courts where they were needed when, after suggesting that Neustadt could easily come under the courts of Laybach, he stressed that the exact reverse was needed in Istria, a province that had passed from the Austrians to the Kingdom of Italy in 1806, before becoming part of ‘Illyria’. Since it had come under the French, Istria had only one tribunal, in its capital, the wealthy port of Trieste, but its rugged mountain interior badly needed local courts of its own: ‘. . . it is without roads; the city of Istria is very expensive, for both its inns and its lawyers; it is a big expense and a greater inconvenience for the people of Istria to have to go to Trieste’.14 Here was the dilemma encapsulated: courts were needed most, where they were hardest to create, and to control. To the end of providing direct supervision of the administration of justice, Coffinhal – usually so determined on conformity to French norms in all things – authorised the creation of ‘mobile’ public prosecutors and even mobile presidents for many local tribunals, in serious criminal cases, and to sit on the military courts. He saw this as the only way to overcome both the lack of capable local magistrates and the problems of geography, and to ensure that proper procedures were observed: it is often the case in these provinces . . . that imperial prosecutors and judges who have little grasp of the new legislation, will need a sure guide who can explain and oversee the execution of the laws15

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Coffinhal insisted on this way of working, even though it put his most able personnel under great strain, and often denuded the higher courts in Laybach of much needed expertise. That this proposal to break with organisational norms came from Coffinhal reveals the magnitude of the problem he felt confronted his mission. Yet, it was a means to the ultimate end of ensuring that justice was administered to the letter of the French law; it was not made in a spirit of conciliation to local traditions or practices, but better to eradicate them. In the former Austrian provinces, a scattered settlement pattern had fostered the utility of the burgermeister as the key official of local government. The office of the burgermeister, left largely untouched by the sweeping reforms of Joseph II, combined the administrative role of the French maire with those of the justice of the peace. This was a very practical response both to the paucity of qualified personnel at local level, a problem rife even in rural France and throughout western Europe, and so hardly peculiar to ‘Illyria’. However, it stood in direct contradiction to the sacrosanct concept of ‘the division of powers’ at the heart of Napoleonic administration. Dandolo described the overlapping of judicial, political and administrative powers he found in the former Venetian province of Zara as ‘monstrous’, when he took over its government on behalf of the Kingdom of Italy, in 1807,16 thus revealing an important ideological continuity between the empire and its satellite state. Yet his reactions also reveal the fundamental incompatibility of even the ‘civilised’ urban Adriatic ports with Napoleonic norms. Even within the relatively well-administered former Austrian provinces, Charbol, the Intendant-General, thought the combination of administration and judicial powers the office of burgermeister led to corruption, ‘a means or a chance, to make a fortune’.17 The Napoleonic policy was emphatic that administrative and judicial functions had to be carried out by different local officials, thus doubling the need for government personnel at local level at a stroke, where capable men were scarce. The regime’s dogmatism on this point is all the more evident because French officials repeatedly contrasted the poor quality of the justices of the peace with that of the maires, who were often drawn from the local elites, even though, as the Governor-General noted in 1812, these honest men were not well versed in French practices.18 Coffinhal agreed that the maires were reliable, but he drew attention to the fact that, because of the newness of the French legislation, maires were reluctant to involve

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themselves even in those aspects of legal business they were obliged to administer, usually connected with police matters.19 However, it might actually have been worse for the separation of powers, when the local authorities actually did take their duties seriously. This was a problem that endured to the end, for as late as 1813 a senior French official admitted that local communities in the former Austrian provinces still regarded the French office of maire as the equivalent of a burgermeister: Numerous directives have had to be issued to remind these officials that the division of powers is essential to our legislation, which has no relationship to the idea these men still have that civil administrative and judicial powers are united in the hands of their former administrators.20 In May 1813 the Intendent-General remarked to his subordinate in the province of Croatia that he was still concerned by ‘the bad outlook’ of the magistracy of Karlstadt, and that it was equally essential ‘to restrain the civil authorities within their proper competence’ to avoid a clash between the magistracy and local government.21 In Carinthia and Carinola, the problem was that of different approaches to local government. In the Balkan interior, east of the Dinaric Alps, it was simply an absence of any centrally directed local administration at all. This was less a region of dispersed settlement than of nomadic peoples, in the eyes of most of the French. Its people, the Morlaques, were thought to be descendants of the Scythians ‘and they still display these signs of their barbaric and warlike origins to the civilised world,’ in the opinion of the young French Intendant of Dalmatia in 1813.22 The absence of towns and the nomadic pastoralism which was the basis of the economy reinforced in the French that sense of a distinct equation between sedentary life and true civilisation, so prevalent in Enlightenment thought.23 Dandolo had seen in former Venetian Dalmatia two distinct countries, where it would take a very long time for the Napoleonic code to be relevant, never mind to work. His solution was to accommodate local conditions,24 a policy alien to Paris and so irrelevant to Coffinhal. Nevertheless, the reality of dealing with the Morlaques was compounded by the extension of ‘Illyria’ into Military Croatia, the march created by the Habsburgs as a buffer against the Ottomans. Such regions were always largely left to themselves,

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almost by definition. During the Napoleonic wars, this was hard to change, and defensive priorities simply made the French suspend all their administrative norms there.25 The problems of finding locations for judicial institutions, of erasing the culture of the overlapping jurisdictions – as crystallised by the office of burgermeister – and the lack of suitable personnel, at least to French minds, did not prevent one Napoleonic importation becoming popular throughout ‘Illyria’, if perhaps for the wrong reasons. The lowest rung of the judicial ladder, the justice of the peace, was frequently reported to Paris as the most successful element in the judicial order. Established early in the French Revolution, and partly modelled on English practice, the justices of the peace were based in the cantons, the unit just above the commune; they were meant to be drawn from the local community, in contrast to senior magistrates, and part of their task was to arbitrate informally in minor disputes, wherever possible sparing people the expense and potential bitterness of going to law. The disparate elements of ‘Illyria’ had two things in common, if little else: the isolation of so many communities beyond the Adriatic coast, and a penchant for vendetta, so common in the rural Mediterranean. The justice of the peace was an office which, if in the right hands, could respond to these ingrained problems and, up to a point, this seems to have been the case under the French. The Governor-General felt it was essential to have justices of the peace in place for just these reasons. Budua, in the hinterlands of the province of Cattaro, was typical of his assessment of the ‘barbarism’ which lived in proximity to the Ventian civilisation of the coastal cities: Budua is situated . . . in the midst of barbarous people where vendettas between families are sadly all too common. The yoke of the law is . . . unknown. A good justice of the peace is one of the greatest benefits we can offer this country; he will do more to assure public peace than a battalion (of soldiers) could; a good justice of the peace will make the Emperor’s name blessed and will attach these people to him. However, no one wanted the post, because ‘no one wanted to exile himself to the midst of these barbarians; I have been searching for an able man in vain for eight months’.26 When one was finally

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found – one Liepopilly – he won praise from the Intendant simply for persuading local people to make use of him. Budua was an area with a sizeable Greek Orthodox population, where the role of justice of the peace and that of public notary had largely been in the hands of the clergy and where ‘everything was done by arbitration’.27 Those who administered justice under the old order could not have been further removed from French norms, but the spirit of arbitration and conciliation the French inherited from this unlikely quarter seemed to have eased the process of establishing the office of justice of the peace in this isolated periphery. How the law was interpreted at local level was a different matter, however. Justices of the peace and their immediate superiors in the civil tribunals were seldom versed in even the rudiments of French law. Coffinhal’s early assessment on his arrival in ‘Illyria’ did not change from his assessment in 1811: ‘our methods are utterly alien to them, and they raise doubts about everything, and would be confounded by the simplest (legal) acts’.28 Two years later, following a major reorganisation of the entire system, which meant the technical resignation and reappointment of all the justices of the peace, Coffinhal still lamented that, as far as their competence went, they ‘incessantly reproduced uncertainties in their opinions, which only adds new problems for the conduct of business’.29 This was only what they felt compelled to report, however, for much certainly escaped the eye of the French at this level. Rather than becoming the immediate link between the people and the law, their greatest attribute became their ability to avoid direct contact with an alien system of justice. The mixed reception of the lowest office in the judicial hierarchy emerges in their appraisal by a civil official, Santo, the sub-delegate of the province of Zara, in 1813. On the one hand, their authority to arbitrate and conciliate minor disputes without recourse to a great deal of paperwork was of great help in ensuring that some problems were dealt with to the satisfaction of local communities. However, ‘unversed in the principles of the new legislation, they were not capable of resolving the simplest litigation, or they did so badly, thus overburdening the tribunals of first instance,’ when many cases had to be appealed needlessly.30 This was in stark contrast to their willingness to deal with criminal matters, it should be noted. Over one hundred cases of minor criminal matters came before the justices of the peace of Zara province between 1811 and 1813.31 Where there was a real and present

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danger, the local elites on the bench faced it with determination, however ill-equipped to do so in Coffinhal’s eyes. Nevertheless, the imperial government seemed to want to confide extensive powers to the Illyrian justices of the peace, giving them more responsibility and latitude than elsewhere. When Coffinhal pointed out that under the original decrees, which created the office, they could impose sentences on criminal matters as heavy as five years in prison, the Minister of Justice had to reply that, although he also found this odd, it was in accordance with what the government seemed to want.32 The minister took up this anomaly in a report to Napoleon in May 1812, and stressed that Coffinhal was right to want to curb their powers, in line with French norms.33 Coffinhal insisted this was a very dangerous policy to follow. Coffinhal was almost terrified by the lack of the right to appeal in so many instances where justices of the peace were now responsible: so, behold the village justice of the peace, a man alone, invested with the dread right to condemn (someone) to five years in prison or a fine of twenty-five francs, and the people of whole canton (are) exposed to his moods, to his hatred and to his vengeance, without any recourse . . . and this man, alone, can also hand down a condemnation to ten years imprisonment, checked only by recourse to a local tribunal composed of three judges.34 The most senior public prosecutor in the Provinces, the French magistrate Descleau, agreed, telling Paris that the poor quality of the justices of the peace, their low levels of pay – itself a major French concession for an office that carried no remuneration anywhere else in the empire, except the recently annexed and even more convulsed Catalan departments35 – and their isolation from superior authority, was a ‘lethal combination’.36 This was no minor matter. Some Illyrian cantons were huge by any standards, not just French norms, numbering more than 15,000 people, spread over vast distances. The kingdoms of these potential tyrants were considerable. The constant plea from Coffinhal was for a system that was more French, not less. However, those norms were changing in France itself. There were plans in 1812 to increase the powers of the justices of the peace, to embrace a wider range of business, and to increase the monetary value of civil cases they could deal with. The Illyrian Provinces appear to have been seen as a ‘guinea pig’ in this

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belated experiment in devolution. Prima facia, ‘Illyria’ was an obvious choice for this greater emphasis on local autonomy, if seen only in terms of topography and settlement patterns, but the reality was more complex. Many of the problems that confronted the French when creating the justices of the peace reached to the apex of the hierarchy, when cultural terms are also considered.

Clashes of cultures: The political geography of the old order In all matters of personnel and the question of a fundamental change in legal culture, the ancien re´gime political geography of ‘Illyria’ proved decisive. Coffinhal had many problems of a very high magnitude to face, which were common to the establishment of the French judicial system all over the empire, and proved just as acute in the Illyrian Provinces, if not more so. Low levels of pay aggravated recruitment and retention of personnel at every level of the system, from greffiers and huissiers, at the bottom, to senior magistrates on the Court of Appeal, in Laybach, at the apex.37 He also faced widespread ignorance of French legislation and procedures, as he had during his tenure in Rome, and in common with colleagues engaged on equivalent missions of establishment all over Italy, the Netherlands, Catalonia and Germany. However, all these widespread problems were magnified in the Illyrian Provinces, which led Coffinhal – so insistent on operating through correct forms and procedures – to admit that, in the end, he had opted for intelligence, reliability, ancien re´gime legal expertise and reputation even in senior appointments, virtually abandoning the search for jurists with a grip on French legislation. He had to pin his hopes on their capacity to ‘learn on the job’. Coffinhal considered the two best courts in the provinces to be the Courts of Appeal of Laybach, and that established at Zara, in 1811. In the case of the former, he based his hopes on the affinities of the Napoleonic system with the older influences of Austrian rule. On the latter, he was able to transfer to Zara men from Trieste who had served under the Kingdom of Italy. Coffinhal had to admit that although the magistrates in Laybach made good judges when dealing with legislation they were familiar with, none of them was capable of being a prosecutor, nor was anyone really to be trusted with criminal cases. He eventually imported a young lawyer from Turin to cover the post of substitute prosecutor. Zara, however exemplary in having a good local prosecutor in

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Benvenuti, was composed of too few judges, so small was the pool of able magistrates, and even they could not really be trusted in many criminal matters.38 Language difficulties were also a problem throughout the empire, but this was compounded by the intense diversity of ‘Illyria’ itself in a specific manner: the French felt they had found two potential pools of competent personnel in the region. The first was based in the magistracy of the former Austrian provinces of Carinola and Carinthia, mainly concentrated in Laybach, areas which had known the Josephist reforms. The second was in the province of Istria, which had been part of the Kingdom of Italy since 1806, and especially in its major city, the port of Trieste.39 The French quickly made a singular concession to the administrative and judicial systems in the Illyrian Provinces, when they conceded the right to work not only in French for all purposes, but in German and Italian, written as well as oral. However, this was of only limited use to Coffinhal, for he could not deploy his two most able sources of magistrates across the provinces. The educated classes of Istria could work only in Italian, and those of the former Austrian provinces only in German. Elsewhere in the empire, the usual problem faced by the French was finding competent jurists who could work both in French and the local language – which was hard enough – but the extreme diversity of ‘Illyria’ emerges starkly, here, because even an unprecedented concession to local realities did nothing to ameliorate the deeper problem of linguistic estrangement within ‘Illyria’ as a whole. In hard, practical terms, Coffinhal could not send his ablest men where he needed them most because of the language barrier within the elites. When a major reorganisation of the whole imperial judicial system in 1811 threatened to produce redundancies in some of the courts of the Dalmatian coastal cities, Coffinhal could not transfer some of the few able men he had to the Court of Appeal in Laybach: the choice was demotion or redundancy, when promotion might actually have been possible, but for the language barrier.40 It could be different within linguistic zones, however. Within the ‘Italian zone’ of Dalmatia, part of the relatively high quality of the Court of Appeal of Zara was the ability to bring in magistrates from Trieste, with experience of serving the Kingdom of Italy, as has been seen. Coffinhal was also able to move his ablest men around the German-speaking areas of Carinola and Carinthia, provided he could persuade them to leave Laybach.41 Beyond these

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linguistic barriers, they could not support each other. Paris could and did make important concessions over language, but it could not overcome the highly composite nature of the entity it had created. That Coffinhal felt he had only two regional sources of competent personnel, betrayed far deeper, more structural problems in the provinces. General Bertrand described Ragusa as ‘a city remarkable for its urbanity . . . situated amidst barbarism,’ so impressed was he by its intellectual life.42 He shared with Coffinhal a respect for the magistrates they had inherited from the Venetian-style republics of Ragusa and Cattaro, and Zara, a Venetian possession, although low levels of pay and an unwillingness to learn French procedures led Coffinhal to complain that he had trouble finding ‘honest men’ to fill posts there, in contrast to the wealth of talent enjoyed under the old order. Coffinhal’s innate respect for the magistrates of the old order in Ragusa was clear in his determination to get them good pensions when he had to retire them, and to make them ‘honorary magistrates’ in acknowledgement of the public esteem in which they were held.43 Their age and local expertise had deprived him of the best magistrates in Ragusa. Unmediated, uncompromising regime change had produced a set of circumstances which led to the detriment of the magistracy. In contrast to the respect in which he held the senators of the old Republic of Ragusa, Coffinhal lamented of the men of the new regime: Whatever the reason, I have put forward the least mediocre local men . . . it is impossible to hide the fact that neither great, nor even decent results can be hoped for from this court, which does not resemble any other of the Empire.44 Coffinhal soon learned that the French had overstepped the intellectual resources of the region in creating a Court of Appeal in Zara, in the conditions of regime change they imposed.45 Cities which had governed themselves for centuries found themselves administered by outsiders and local men who were not their cream, as a direct result of French rigidity. When they stepped beyond the cities of the Dalmatian coast or the former Austrian provinces, it was clear that places like Budua were the rule rather than the exception. An alien world stood violently opposed to them. Even the violence of the periphery was fundamentally

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different to social violence elsewhere, in Coffinhal’s eyes. The vendetta culture and banditry of the Dinaric Alps and the interior was, simply, the product of a barbarism rooted in primitive conditions and lack of any authority. In 1811, he told Paris that crimes in the hinterland of Cattaro were unlikely to be reported frequently, not just because of the remote, difficult nature of the area, but through ‘the natural negligence’ of its people;46 the back country of Zara was ‘little civilised, crime there results . . . from the customs of its people and the immense length of its coasts’.47 He was not alone in this opinion. The French Intendant of Zara, the young French auditeur of the Council of State, de la Bergerie, saw murder in the region as: an inveterate habit, the result of the ancient barbarism of the populace of the countryside . . . Murders are usually the result of this savage character, the liberal use of arms, that offer an easy recourse to vendetta; drunkenness is a characteristic of the Morlaques. Murder and arson are the consequences of ancient vendettas, passed down from father to son, or from a resentment against the fair rulings of the tribunals.48 Many French prejudices about the predisposition of Dalmatian society to disorder and violence were ironically reinforced for them by a letter to the Minister of Justice by none other than the highest magistrate of Ragusa, Bayamonti, a former senator and now the President of its Court of Appeal. In July 1812, he argued that the statues of the new Imperial Criminal Code could not work in the context of Dalmatian society for several reasons, the most important of which was its failure to a create separate category of violent offences which pertained to ‘honour’, and that even offences rooted in this concept which needed to carry punishments should not include public humiliation. Bayamonti proved himself very learned, citing Beccaria’s belief in the need to adapt laws to local conditions; d’Almbert had created no fewer than six categories of crime, in contrast to only two set out by the new French Code. Yet he attacked the early revolutionaries for not making distinctions between crimes committed by normally respectable people from the respectable classes – who felt punishment more – and the lower classes. Bayamonti pleaded that any man, however honest, could lose his temper if his honour was at stake:

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A man driven by vile ends, who abuses the confidence of a friend . . . Who would dare to say this is not truly infamous? Someone else, however, led by the ardent feelings of a heart informed by vengeance, plunges a dagger into the breast of his adversary . . . would one not wish to say he was driven to it, rather than that it was cruel? I would like the character of the penalty to be brought into line with this principle, not to tilt it in favour of barbarism, but better to make the punishment fit the crime. Bayamonti went on to say that, to inflict too severe a punishment on a crime driven by honour, or by honourable passion, would destroy the sense of pride so necessary to drive men to acts of courage and generosity, and would be especially damaging to younger men’s selfesteem, arguments identical to those put forward by some Lombard and Venetian magistrates against the new criminal code of 1810, a sign of how deeply embedded Venetian social mores were in the upper reaches of Dalmatian society.49 Bayamonti did more than cite the leading jurisconsultes of the Enlightenment; he threw the French concept of honour, so engrained in the Napoleonic military ethos, back in their faces: if the French push their enthusiasm for honour to the point of idolatry, the Illyrian, in whose veins still runs the blood of his illustrious ancestors, whose glorious exploits still ring in his ears, is no less driven by the same generous sentiments. Thus, infamous punishments diametrically opposed to the honourable man, cannot be applicable to the people of Illyria, or at least not without a very deal of modification. What worried Bayamonti most was the spectacle of young sons of the elite being publicly labelled as common criminals.50 Inadvertently, this distinguished member of the local elite had revealed to the French just how alien their concepts of crime, punishment, privilege and honour actually were. Coffinhal commented to the minister that he had passed this on to him because Bayamonti had been so insistent, and hoped he would find it useful, adding that he was a good judge, and worked very hard. The minister politely replied to Bayamonti that his contribution had been instructive, and had been noted.51 However much the French

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might admire the rich cultural life of the urban elites of Dalmatia, it did not necessarily translate into compatibility with Napoleonic public official culture or methods of government when it came to finding competent, or well-disposed, judicial personnel. Bayamonti’s missive is all the more poignant because it stressed the prevalence of noble violence at the apex of this society. It drove home to the French that disorder and alien mores imbued Dalmatian society from top to bottom, in town and country alike. Coffinhal attributed the disorder in the former Austrian provinces to very different causes, as is evident in his handling of the aftermath of the 1809 revolts there. This is all the more striking because these risings had posed a real threat to security during the Wagram campaign.52 When the police commissioner of Laybach pleaded with his superiors for leniency towards several villages in Carinola which had risen as part of Hofer’s Tyrolean rebellion, he insisted that ‘. . . the people of Carinola . . . having since then, shown the most perfect obedience to the new government,’ deserved an amnesty; they had only followed their ‘natural leaders’, the clergy, nobility and local officials; since the change of regime, they had done the same.53 Coffinhal was quick to concur. He argued that collective violence in this region had been the product of politics, and it had been led by the local elites – landowners, priests, innkeepers – and there had been little trouble since; where it happened, it was in connection with conscription and taxation, which led to smuggling; the people of Carinola deserved an amnesty because they were not, by nature, lawless. He noted that the Governor-General was in full agreement with him.54 A ‘moral geography’, as much as a map of crime and disorder, had emerged in the minds of the French.

Criminal justice: A permanent crisis For all the striking differences within their borders, every corner of the Illyrian Provinces shared the common bond of having serious problems of law and order. All of their frontiers were porous: Carinthia and Carinola bordered the Austrian Empire; Dalmatia had frontiers with both the Ottoman Empire and Montenegro, as well as its Adriatic coast, dotted with islands, and with the Royal Navy entrenched at Lissa; Military Croatia bordered the Ottoman Empire. Istria had the only wellcontrolled border in the provinces, that to its west with the Kingdom of

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Italy, but it had the Alpine passes to its north, into the Tyrol and Upper Austria. Almost all these frontiers were invitations to smuggling, the avoidance of conscription and brigandage, some of long-standing, as in Dalmatia, some of more recent origin, as in the former Austrian provinces, as Coffinhal learned very quickly. Further inland, the Dinaric Alps cradled a culture of vendetta and banditry all their own, which was almost anthropological in nature to French eyes, and engendered atavistic fears in the urban centres, which dated from well before the complete breakdown of order in the 1790s. Indigenous disorder of every sort and origin had been severely aggravated by the wars of the period. The arrival of the French in 1810 came in the wake of the war of 1809, which appeared to inaugurate a period of peace that gave them a chance to impose some sort of order on the Illyrian Provinces. Even this lull in the military conflict with Austria and Russia, which left the region behind the frontline until 1813, has to be qualified, both by the continued hostilities with the British along the coast, and by the often ferocious localised resistance to conscription and the French religious reforms throughout the period of their rule. These disorders have been well chronicled.55 Less well known is the impact of this disorder to the French policy of imposing their system of criminal justice on the region. ‘Illyria’ was hardly alone in Napoleonic Europe, in its serious problems of law and order, but its composite character, in terms of both its physical and human geography, made it a microcosm for almost every form of violent unrest the period contained. Thus, exceptional institutions of criminal justice continued to dominate there, from beginning to end. Extraordinary Military Tribunals worked alongside – and often in conflict with – the normal criminal courts Coffinhal had been sent there to create. The tense relationship between these parallel judicial systems was also a common feature of the Napoleonic period in convulsed regions across Europe, but in Dalmatia under Italian rule, it took on an especially sharp edge because of the difficult relationship between Dandolo and Marmont – each responsible for the civilian and military courts, respectively, and from the simple fact that, unlike many other parts of the empire, the military courts pre-dated those created after annexation, to replace those set up by Dandolo for the Kingdom of Italy. Nevertheless, in spite of the many tensions which were inevitable where significant overlaps of power existed, what emerges from their correspondence with Paris is a good working relationship between

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Coffinhal and the military Governor-General who succeeded Marmont, General Bertrand, in the years 1811– 12, when the major work of judicial reform took place. The judicial and military chiefs shared a ‘moral geography’ of ‘Illyria’ which did much to ameliorate their potentially difficult relationship. As has been seen, Coffinhal and Bertrand shared a wish to extend clemency, through amnesties, to the rank and file of the rebels of 1809 in Carinola, a tempered approach to general disorder in the former Austrian provinces they felt should be more general. In most parts of the empire, military commissions were often reluctant to get involved in complex criminal matters, for instance where prosecuting smuggling might entail complex relationships between bandits and financiers56 or even in cases of resistance to conscription, where legal or medical fraud was involved. Coffinhal, with his background in the Cour de Cassation which gave him a clear grasp of procedures, was rare in his insistence that legal boundaries could be transgressed in the opposite direction by civilian criminal courts. There were cases of rebellion where, to protect the local magistrates, the military courts had their proper role to play.57 Nevertheless, Coffinhal’s training on Cassation allowed him to seize on legal niceties even in the eye of a major crisis of law and order. Over 10,000 men from Carinola were thought to have fled into Austrian territory after the collapse of the 1809 revolt, to avoid the imposition of conscription, a number so great as to have been detrimental to agriculture. Coffinhal argued for an amnesty on the grounds that they had fled before the French had actually imposed conscription, and so had not actually defied the law, a neat solution that avoided both conflict with the military and the need for the French courts to appear indulgent. His superiors agreed, applauding his acumen in an internal report.58 Nevertheless, Coffinhal and his superiors were acutely aware that the military commissions, both under Italian rule and after annexation, had handed out many questionable sentences, usually of a very harsh nature. The French saw it as a priority to investigate the work of the military courts of Cattaro and Ragusa, as well as Laybach. However, Coffinhal was not sanguine about being able to do this properly, given the poor quality of his own magistrates and the difficult communications his agents faced in reaching many of the remote villages where the sentences had been carried out. It was an important task, nonetheless. Coffinhal turned to the civil administrators, the young French Intendants, not his own men,

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asking them to go through the judgements passed after the revolts, and to single out to him those cases most worthy of re-examination and possible amnesty.59 This process represented, to a degree, a condemnation of the heavy handedness of Marmont in the early years, as well as a clear indication that Coffinhal, despite his own ‘moral geography’ of ‘Illyria’, was determined to extend legality to even the most convulsed parts of the provinces. Bayamonti’s unconscious revelation of a violent elite, where bloodshed pervaded the defence of honour, did not influence Coffinhal or his colleagues in the quest to equity. He showed concern to appease local elites, not just the rank and file, where they were naturally respectful of authority, as in Carinola. A case in Istria saw Coffinhal urge clemency towards well-respected members of local, village elites who had been leaders in the 1809 revolt, when Istria was still under the Kingdom of Italy. As he had in the case of Carinola, Coffinhal noted with legal subtlety that an amnesty was granted by Milan, but that in these cases they could not benefit from it on a technicality as they received seven years’ imprisonment, and it only applied to people who got six years or less. This offered the French a way to win ‘hearts and minds’, and to correct an oversight. He again made a clear distinction between the need to deal with hardened criminals and men of local standing, who had fought for the constituted authorities, as was their role in society, before regime change. Coffinhal argued that this would do much to appease the local authorities and ‘the leading inhabitants’; he put strict legalism in the service of political objectives. One man, Palin, a priest, was very ill; the other, Celian, had a large family who were suffering very much while he was in gaol. As in Carinola, Coffinhal argued this was a purely political offence; they had been misled and heavily influenced by the Austrian commander, and were normally peaceful men. His recommendations were subsequently adopted by Paris.60 Few arms of the French administration had a greater part to play in righting previous wrongs as the judiciary, be it for the masses or the local elites. In Coffinhal, the policy of reconciliation had found a skilled and dedicated practitioner. He came to incarnate the introduction of the rule of law into the region after a prolonged period of disorder. This did not spell a return to the kind of ‘indulgence’ the French so despised in the anciens re´gimes they had succeeded. Far from it. A recurrent complaint from Coffinhal and his subordinates was that the gaols were overflowing, and that the criminal courts, badly

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understaffed, simply could not cope with the workload. Coffinhal’s perspective made him fear that the slow pace of the administration of justice would lead to a lack of confidence in the new regime, a view strongly supported by the Minister of Justice.61 This was compounded still further by the sure, if necessarily imprecise, knowledge that many serious crimes went unreported, particularly in Dalmatia, and that a considerable number of serious offenders simply escaped with impunity over the many porous borders ‘Illyria’ afforded them. Nevertheless, there is also ample evidence that the arrival of proper courts and a regime determined to restore order had given people a degree of confidence in this aspect of Napoleonic rule. Even in the province of Zara, among the most crime-ridden in Dalmatia, in 1812, over 400 denunciations came before the public prosecutor from private individuals, while one hundred lesser offences were reported to the justices of the peace.62 As in so many other parts of the empire, a desire to curb the worst excesses of prolonged anarchy could be seen emerging once the new system was in place, however imperfectly.

The Civil Code: The barrier of feudalism When the French tackled crime and disorder in the Illyrian provinces, they did so in the face of a disastrous set of circumstances; they took responsibility for an emergency of some magnitude. With the introduction of the Civil Code, they challenged social and economic structures and cultural mores which had but one thing in common throughout the provinces: incompatibility with the new legal order. One of the most striking lessons of Coffinhal’s attempts to apply the letter of the Civil Code to ‘Illyria’ was that the problems he faced, and the opposition he met with, were over the most fundamental aspects of the Code; Illyrian conditions brought the French back to the very foundations of the new regime which had emerged from the Revolution, and been enshrined in the Code by Napoleon. Coffinhal faced a challenge of the most basic kind. Charbol, the Intendant-General for the civil administration, wrote to Paris in September 1812 agreeing with the Minister of the Interior that ‘the advantages which would result from the abolition of feudalism . . . would improve the state of the most numerous class of the population’.63 This now had to be done in provinces where it was

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the bedrock of society and the economy. In much of coastal Croatia and the former Austrian provinces, feudal rights took the form of duties and taxes owed to landlords which went beyond that of normal rents. The French felt themselves the direct heirs of Joseph II in Carinthia and Carinola; the link between the Napoleonic reforms and those of aggressive enlightened absolutism was clear to all, in these circumstances. However, even in so small an area, that legacy was very different between the two provinces. Joseph’s reforms had worked in Carinola, where a decree of 1776, when he was still co-ruler with his mother, had modified the system of rents and duties in favour of the peasant tenants, the coloni, reducing the power and revenues of the noble landlords. The result, according to the Intendant of Croatia, a former Hungarian province where Joseph’s reforms were never introduced, and bordered Carinola, served to underline the gap in progress and prosperity between the two areas: ‘it is regrettable that the Edict of 1776 had never been applied to Croatia’.64 Carinthia had not been as fortunate as Carinola, either. Joseph had created a commission to reform feudalism in the area in 1788, but he died the following year and its work was then sidelined, which left the peasantry still burdened with heavy obligations, most of which were either ‘purely feudal or sullied by it’ in the telling choice of words of its Intendant. The result was a poverty that did not exist in Carinola, and the young French official expressed the hope that the work of Joseph’s commission might serve as the basis for new reforms.65 As the observations of the Intendant of Croatia indicated, in those Illyrian provinces which had been under the Hungarian, rather than the Austrian, crown, the French perceived structures they considered to be mediaeval. Here, there was no ancien re´gime baton to pick up. This was why there was a powerful current of thought among the elites of Ragusa, in particular, to persuade the Great Powers in 1807 to allow them to come under the Hungarian crown, and so avoid Dandolo’s initial assault on their feudal rights.66 In Croatia, the French expressed unbridled contempt for what they found, conditions that turned the sons of ancien re´gime seigneurs into the last exponents of the reforms of 4 August 1789. A young aristocrat of the La Tour du Pin – once the greatest feudal lords in the northern Auvergne – and now the Intendant of Civil Croatia, castigated the ‘feudalism in all the severity of its origins which still exists in this country’ and went on:

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The Royal Free Towns are the only places where the laws, uses and abuses of feudalism have not reduced the inhabitants to a state of desperation by the loss of the fruits of their lands to the luxury of a few people – for the most part lazy and useless – who paralyse all energy and industry in this way. He went on to argue that ‘these continual discussions between the peasants (coloni) and their seigneurs and the obstacles these create for the workings of the administration will cease as soon as His Majesty pronounces the abolition of feudal (rights)’.67 Clearly, the French nobleman felt no common bond to his fellow Croatian aristocrats. On the edge of their empire, Frenchmen of all backgrounds found common cause in the core values of their Revolution. His colleague in Ragusa noted, more soberly, that the bad will engendered by the obstinacy of the landlords led to work being done ‘with the worst will’ and hardening of coloni against the whole traditional system.68 Charbol put it directly to his superiors in April 1812: ‘the feudal system still exists here, as it did in France in the fifteenth century (and) the region will have difficulty in accepting our laws, our ways of working, to our norms’.69 In such daunting circumstances, the law remained a dead letter in the very essence of its spirit, equality. Yet, the abolition of feudalism was an aspect of the French reforms which, not unlike the restoration of order, promised much for the mass of the population. Indeed, there was a powerful identity of interest between the coloni and the new regime in this, for it was widely recognised by the French that the burden of feudal dues, if not abolished or at least cut back to those impositions that could not be defined as legally feudal, impeded people paying their taxes to the state. The Intendant of Dalamtia noted that ‘the taxes administered by the government are far lighter than those levied by individuals’,70 while the Intendants universally asserted that feudalism simply left people too poor to pay their taxes to the state. The potential to win support for the regime through the implementation of the Civil Code appears evident, but only if seen in isolation from its other policies in ‘Illyria’. Abolition failed in great part simply because the magnitude of the task was beyond the capacity of the regime in the short space of time it held the region and its lack of effective control in those parts of ‘Illyria’ where feudal rights were most

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prevalent, conditions which bear some comparison with the situation in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples, where the letter of the law survived the fall of the empire, but was often eluded by the great landowners.71 The Intendant of Ragusa pointed directly to the failure to control the local judiciary, the justices of the peace in particular, as an important part of the failure to enforce this key element of the Civil Code. Going to law could see the coloni come out of the process worse, for even where the local magistrates were not effectively controlled by the local elite, the costs of travelling so far to find justice – which he put at at least 15 francs – far outweighed the usual price of the dues he was fighting for, which could amount to only 3 or 4 francs.72 This did not imply that the burden was inconsequential for the peasant, but geography stood in the way of cheap justice, even when local politics did not. The anarchy of the late 1790s had unleashed ferocious and widespread resistance by the coloni to the burden of feudal dues in Dalmatia, and they remained in arms during the Austrian occupation. Indeed, 1797 saw the height of these disturbances in the coastal regions.73 This should have opened a door for the French, as Coffinhal and many intendants obviously hoped, but the prospect of abolition – whether by the fiat of the Code, in Dalmatia and Croatia, or the revival of Josephist projects in Carinthia and Croatia – was overshadowed by the imposition of conscription, which inexorably turned the masses against the new regime. No government policy, even one so attuned to popular interests as the eradication of feudal obligations, could hope to balance the hatred engendered by ‘the blood tax’.74 This was the single greatest dilemma of the Napoleonic regime: the needs of mass warfare blunted almost every positive reform it initiated that might ameliorate the conditions of the peasantry. This was writ large in the Illyrian provinces.

The impact of the French reforms Coffinhal’s mission seemingly left no trace behind it, after the French withdrew from the Illyrian provinces in the last months of 1813. However, when Austrian rule returned, it was to the entirety of the Illyrian provinces, which they retained as the ‘Kingdom of Illyria’ within the Austrian Empire. In gradual stages between 1814 and 1816, the Austrian Civil Code replaced the Napoleonic legislation, and the policy of placing these heterogeneous territories under a single legal

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system continued. The architect of this was Metternich, long a proponent of reform within the Habsburg monarchy, however determined he was to overthrow Napoleon.75 Thus, something of the spirit, if hardly the letter, of Coffinhal’s mission survived the collapse of the empire: there was no return to the diversity or local independence of the pre-revolutionary world, a back-handed compliment to the hopeless task the French had set themselves. The drive to abolish feudalism ended for the moment, as did the imposition of alien court procedures. With the reintroduction of the use of local languages into the administration, and the arrival of Germanand Italian-speaking officials, many of the artificial problems the French had created for themselves eased considerably. Perhaps the most profound revelation of the experience of ‘Illyria’ was that, when confronting rampant disorder and deeply embedded feudalism, the French returned to their own revolutionary roots, regardless of their personal backgrounds. Backwardness in every aspect of society was to be fought and corrected through the imposition of the laws of the empire, without compromise. More than any of their other possessions, the French felt a need to civilise, improve and Gallicise these provinces, precisely because they were so alien to them. In so doing, they were not wholly without grounds for hope. Local officials always cried out for more magistrates in the courts, not fewer; the justices of the peace often proved a popular institution, however at odds with Coffinhal their interpretation of the Code might be. The arrival of a regime intent on restoring order was not wholly unwelcomed, even in the most rebellious parts of the provinces, and the desire for the quick, inexpensive justice the French prided themselves on dispensing found some appreciation. Above all, the potential abolition of feudalism boded well for the regime, in principle. All of this was overshadowed by the hard truth that the empire had overreached its capabilities when it assumed the challenge of ruling ‘Illyria’: its resources were too thinly stretched, its grip on law and order too tenuous, the British and Turks too close, for their initiatives to take root. Above all, however, the ruthless imposition of conscription, and the haste with which they introduced so many unheard of reforms, condemned greater hopes to failure. ‘Illyria’ was where the edge of empire became a downward slope.

PART III PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

6 FERDINANDO DAL POZZO: A PIEDMONTESE NOTABLE AT THE HEART OF NAPOLEONIC EUROPE, 1800—14

T

he public sphere of the ancien re´gime state of the House of Savoy was narrow, circumscribed by both the small size of its territories, and so its state apparatus, but also by the structures of its bureaucracy and judicial institutions. The ambitions and horizons of its subjects were also circumscribed, even at the highest echelons of government. Nevertheless, the Savoyard monarchy had also instituted one of the most rigorous and advanced systems of education for its elites in Europe. Under the absolutist monarchy, every senior magistrate and administrator was required to hold a degree from the University of Turin, founded by Victor Amadeus II at the end of the seventeenth century. When the monarchy finally fell in 1798, under the pressure of French invasion begun by Napoleon in 1796, its legacy to the new rulers of their territories was one of the best educated elites, and one of the most thoroughly professional bureaucracies in Europe. The French knew this – Napoleon drew directly on the Savoyard model of the University of Turin when he created his own ‘Imperial University’ in 1806 – and they quickly set about trying to harness this well-trained pool of talent for their own service. In reality, the French were often disappointed by the Piedmontese in their service, but when they finally secured their rule in the region following Napoleon’s victories in the second Italian

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campaign of 1800, this lay in the future. The initial impression of the new rulers of Piedmont was of an elite honed in the traditions of an efficient absolutist monarchy, of men with whom they could work, and who could be of service to their own new regime, which was in the process of transforming itself from one of radical revolution to a blend of the most practical elements of the revolutionary reforms of the 1790s, and the more professional aspects of the French ancien re´gime. More than this, by the time the definitive annexation of Piedmont to France had been decided in 1801, France was an expanding state. The victories of 1800 over the powers of the Second Coalition, and over the Habsburgs, in particular, had transformed France from an embattled state, hemmed in by the allied armies, into the dominant power in western Europe. The series of peace treaties concluded by Napoleon in his first years in power confirmed French rule over the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) and Germany west of the Rhine, as well as the mainland territories of the House of Savoy. This expansion was only the prelude to the massive gains in territory that followed the great military victories of 1805–7, however, which brought all of Italy under French domination, as it was partitioned under the two ‘satellite’ kingdoms of Italy and Naples, and the 14 de´partements re´unis, which brought one-third of the peninsula under direct rule from Paris, and made ‘French’ cities of Genoa, Parma, Florence, Siena, and Rome, as well as Turin. This was mirrored by huge gains in Germany, and saw the Netherlands and the whole of the North Sea coast as far as Denmark, brought under Napoleon’s control by 1810. Piedmont was one of the longest-standing, most thoroughly integrated parts of this vast empire, and its professional elites found themselves with unprecedented opportunities for advancement in its service. Seldom in history have the prospects of a ruling class been so utterly transformed so quickly as those of the subalpine bureaucracy under Napoleon. When seen in this context, that of the possibilities open to the former servants of the House of Savoy by their inclusion in the Napoleonic empire, the career of Ferdinando Dal Pozzo assumes at once a unique and a very typical significance for both the history of Napoleonic Europe, and for the future of Italy. Dal Pozzo was unique in the degree of influence he came to exert with his French superiors in shaping the personnel and controlling the workings of their empire in the Italian de´partements re´unis, first within his native Piedmont, and then further afield. However, his

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experience was also typical of the class of provincial Piedmontese notables he belonged to, in that he seized the opportunities for advancement offered to them by inclusion in a large European empire, a change in political circumstances which could not have been more different from that of a middle-sized ancien re´gime absolutism, whose expansionist ambitions stretched no further than the adjacent provinces of Austrian Lombardy. Dal Pozzo was also representative rather than exceptional in his fate after 1814, seeing his ambitions dashed and his professional standards and political beliefs overturned by the restored monarchy. In many ways, Ferdinando Dal Pozzo was a symbol for his age, both in the considerable influence he wielded on his own times, and in the course of his career, which was typical not only of his Piedmontese compatriots but of many German, Belgian and French imperial servants of the Napoleonic empire.

Piedmont and the French Revolution: The transformation of an elite Victor Amadeus III, the ruler of the Savoyard dominions in 1789, was one of the most determined opponents of the French revolution, but he could do little to stop the French seizing the Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice, early in the revolution. However, the core of his Piedmontese possessions were not seriously threatened until Napoleon launched his first Italian campaign in 1796. Within a few months, Piedmont was effectively under French control and much of its administration was in the hands of local ‘patriots’ – often misleadingly labelled ‘Jacobins’ – who were supporters of the French revolution. Alongside them, however, many members of the royal administration remained at their posts, less from any sympathy with the French or the ideology of the revolution, than in an effort to maintain law and order. The region was convulsed by the French invasion, and the harsh realities of military occupation were compounded by a series of poor harvests between 1796 and 1799, which led to mass peasant rebellions which, increasingly, the monarchy sought to exploit against the occupiers. These years, known as the triennio, produced bitter, often violent divisions within the Piedmontese provincial elites, as some local factions sided with the French, while others remained loyal to the monarchy in the wake of the French invasion. In 1799, the military situation was

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briefly reversed, the French were driven out of Italy, and for several months a Savoyard regency returned to power in Turin. The result was a concerted effort to seek out and punish the ‘patriots’, and many essentially loyal royal administrators were included in the ‘lists of suspects’ drawn up in these months. Many patriots, Dal Pozzo among them, took refuge in France at this time, only returning after Napoleon’s second Italian campaign of 1800 drove the allied armies out of the region. After his victory at the battle of Marengo, near Alessandria in June, 1800, Napoleon, now the effective ruler of France as its First Consul, was unsure how to deal with Piedmont, and initially sought the restoration of the monarchy. When he realised he could not rely on Victor Amadeus, who was also intriguing with the Austrians from exile in Sardinia, he decided on direct annexation to France in 1801, and began the process of reorganisation which terminated in 1802. In the period 1800–2, Piedmont was administered by an executive body of five patriots, eventually reduced to three, known as the Consulta`, overseen by a French Commissioner-General, General Jourdan, known for his republican revolutionary sympathies. A number of specialist commissioners served under Jourdan and the Consulta`, for the reorganisation of justice, finances, religion and the police; Jourdan himself dealt with the civil administration. Their overall purpose was to transform the region into a part of France, reshaping its provinces into six – later five – French departments, grouped together as the 27th Military Division. This period and its traumatic, rapid changes of regime proved formative for the Piedmontese elites in many ways, the most lasting and important of which turned on the persecutions of the restored monarchy, in 1799–1800. The very existence of the notorious ‘lists of suspects’ and the experience of exile they produced left an indelible mark on the Piedmontese elites. Many now felt they had no alternative but to serve the French, however reluctantly. Conversely, the rapidly shifting fortunes of the war led even more to retire from public service, fearful that Napoleon’s successes in 1800 might be as quickly reversed as they had been in 1799. It was by no means clear to contemporaries that the peace achieved in 1800 would endure for 14 years; as many French administrators remarked, it was very difficult to persuade many of the finest magistrates and administrators of the old monarchy to serve the new regime, less from ideological repugnance than from fear. It was only after 1807, when Russia and Prussia were finally forced to terms with

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Napoleon, that this reluctance began to recede. Only after 1807 did the French begin to be able to recruit the men they really wanted. The period 1800 –7 was an anomaly in Piedmontese history, a moment when new men could enter a new imperial service and attain unprecedented levels of office and professional success. Dal Pozzo was among them, and his chosen vehicle for success was the magistracy. The French judicial order, as reformed by the revolutionaries, was very different from that of the old monarchy in many essential respects, but the most important for an ambitious magistrate was the difference in court hierarchies between the two. The Savoyard monarchy placed a very strict division between the local magistracy and the higher courts in Turin. The local judges administered law based largely on local statutes; some had degrees from the University and some did not, but very few of them rose above provincial level. There was a very clear divide between them and the Senate of Turin, the only senior court for the whole country, whose magistrates were considered among the highest officials of the monarchy, and who were among the best educated in Europe. Thus, the French inherited two distinct judicial cultures when they assumed control of the region, a situation that was common in many of the Italian states. The introduction of the French court system brought three major administrative changes to that of the Savoyard ancien re´gime. At the lowest level of the French system were the justices of the peace, who administered fewer and larger areas – the cantons – than the local judges of the old order. Above them, a new hierarchical system of courts stretched as far as the Tribunal (later Court) of Appeal in Turin. Previously, only a ‘major judge’ in each provincial capital had stood between the local judges and the Senate, but under the French system, an entirely new body was introduced into Piedmont, the ‘tribunals of first instance’, more commonly known as the civil tribunals. These courts were usually composed of five judges and a public prosecutor, and were established in most of the old provincial capitals, which were now the seats of French arrondissements, the major subdivisions of the departments, which grouped together the old provinces. Finally, the French created separate three special criminal courts, in Turin, Cuneo and Alessandria. This whole system came under the Court of Appeal in Turin. These details may seem trivial, but the new French court hierarchy provided a ladder of promotion for the local judges, and so hitherto unheard of avenues for professional advancement. Nevertheless,

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there was the problem of coming to the attention of their new masters, and in this, Dal Pozzo proved a crucial figure, not only for his own ambitions, but for those of others. The higher magistrates of the Senate of Turin were well known to the French by 1801 from their earlier occupation of Piedmont, but their knowledge of the local judiciary was very limited. Indeed, the senators themselves had had relatively little to do with the local judges, either, under the ancien re´gime. It was soon clear to the French, however, that they would need more than the Turin elite to staff their court system. To this were added the reluctance of some of the Turin elite to serve them and, even more serious, the bitter political divisions within the provincial municipalities engendered by the events of the triennio. All this made recruitment to the new courts a difficult and delicate process, and the French themselves were not completely happy with the results, as will be discussed below. In the immediate context of the first months of their rule, however, the difficult task of complete transition from one system of government to another had to be undertaken as best they could. The French commissioner for the organisation of justice was Jourde, a former magistrate of the Parlement of Toulouse before the revolution, from the Auvergne. He had replaced the Terrorist leader Couthon as deputy for their department, the Puy du Doˆme, after Couthon’s execution in the purge of Thermidor 1794. Latterly, Jourde returned to the judiciary, rising to the highest court in France, Cassation, from where he was sent to Piedmont in 1801. To help him, Jourde formed a ‘commission of justice’ composed of six members of the Senate of Turin. Jourde’s original nominees were Avogadro, the highest-ranking member of the Senate, Botton di Castellamonte, the President of its Chamber of Accounts, Galli, a President of one its Chambers, Bertolotti, the President of its Chamber of Criminal Justice, and Nizzati, an Advocate in the Senate.1 Nizzati did not accept his post, and he was replaced by Dal Pozzo, who was drawn from the lower levels of the Senate, and so the only member of the council who was not of the Turin elite, although closely connected to it. Four years later, when he was called upon again to advise on the personnel for the newly annexed Ligurian departments, Jourde spoke highly of Dal Pozzo, personally, and also of the serious problems the council had faced during its existence from 1801 – 3:

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If I overcame so many obstacles in carrying out this important task, I owe it entirely to them (the members of the Council of Justice). And if the results of our choices for the lower posts did not always correspond to our hopes, one can only blame the difficult circumstances of the moment when the reunion of this country to France was not definitively decided, which made people behave as weaklings, and made us hesitate about putting forward several people of similar character who, uncertain about the turn of events, did not accept (their posts), but who now wish to serve His Majesty (Napoleon). I owe Dal Pozzo the greatest debt in every way; he showed no hesitation, at any time; devoted, honest and loyal2 Dal Pozzo’s role was, indeed, crucial and unique on the council. He was the lowliest member of the group, a provincial who was an Advocate to the Senate, not one of its senior members, but these were exactly his virtues as far as Jourde was concerned. Jourde had to rely on Dal Pozzo’s extensive knowledge of the provinces and their judicial personnel. In fact, Dal Pozzo was firmly rooted in his own area, broadly eastern Piedmont; his networks of friendship and clientage embraced the provinces of Vercelli, Alessandria, Casale and Asti, and he advanced the applications of magistrates from these areas to Jourde.3 Dal Pozzo spoke flawless French, he had proven his loyalty to the French during the triennio, and he knew the provinces with an intimacy that both Jourde, a foreigner, and the Turin elite, lacked. Dal Pozzo also came from a section of the Piedmontese magistracy Jourde had come to admire and trust, the subordinate levels of the Senate of Turin. Thus, his respect for the highest magistrates, like Avogadro and Botton, was clear from the outset, but he developed a real faith in their assistants: There are highly recommendable citizens among the substitutejudges of the office of the Advocate-General of the Senate of Turin, with many good qualities, who would be excluded (if the French norm of an age limit of over thirty were applied to Piedmont), and because men of sufficient ability are rare in this country, if not in Turin, then for the tribunals of the other centres, (they must be promoted).4

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Clear in this, as in so much of his correspondence, is Jourde’s preference for men like Dal Pozzo, and so his faith in his judgement. Clearer still is Jourde’s growing realisation of the severe problems he faced when trying to establish impartial, professional justice beyond Turin. His problems had two main sources, and several compounding difficulties, all of which Dal Pozzo was the key to resolving for him. First, was Jourde’s growing awareness of just how deep had been the ancien re´gime division between the provincial and Turin magistrates, in terms of education and expertise; Jourde now saw Turin as the only reliable, truly desirable source of good magistrates, and he knew only the lower echelons of the Senate might accept provincial posts. In his eyes, the Savoyard monarchy had bequeathed the French a very capable, but also very small pool of real talent; the entire staffs of the Senate and the Chamber of Accounts – ‘which are the two greatest courts (and) where the citizens of the greatest merit are to be found’ – numbered only 50, in total.5 Almost as soon as he arrived in Turin, Jourde was struck by the very high qualities of the senators, and by the willingness of most of them to serve the new regime: I was immediately struck by the willingness of the most senior magistrates to second me in my work of reorganization, and by their desire to serve in the new tribunals which shall replace the existing bodies to which they belong . . . These men already have the confidence and esteem of the public; erudite in their legal studies, members of a Piedmontese institution which approximates to one of our parlements, they have acquired, through the long exercise of the important duties of the magistracy, everything that makes a good judge and a magistrate of integrity.6 High praise of this kind for foreign elites was very rare among French imperial servants, and would become more rare still as they advanced into the rest of Italy and into northern Germany and the Netherlands. Jourde’s successors in Florence, Genoa and Rome, had little good to say about the legal cultures they found, or those who dispensed justice in their new territories. In all this, the Senators of Turin were a real exception to the rule, and their future careers did not disappoint the French.

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It was not the same beyond the walls of the capital, however. The second problem was, in the context of the times, by far the more serious: the bitter divisions of a civil war, rooted in municipal factionalism, that was still very much alive in the minds of the local elites, even if the presence of the French now drove its continuation from overt violence to more subtle means; and among those means were, potentially, the courts. It was problematic enough that the provincial judges of the old order were often not yet fit to assume the more complex responsibilities attendant on the new civil tribunals, with their alien procedures based on the open, public trial and the need for magistrates to administer justice in public, according to a regulated code of laws, which would come into force in 1804, rather than the mass of traditional local statutes they had always known. These problems might be overcome with time. The real crisis facing Jourde in 1801– 3 was simply finding men who would not use their positions to pursue the civil war from the bench. Jourde kept the provincial magistrates off the three criminal courts, and even then sought to make their judgements subject to revision by the Court of Cassation in Paris, which was not the rule in France, because ‘It is very dangerous to leave any of these tribunals in absolute independence.’7 To this end, Jourde and then the Ministry of Justice in Paris after the end of his mission in 1802 always ensured that the three Criminal Courts and the Court of Appeal in Turin were dominated by a mixture of former senators and Frenchmen in their key, most senior positions. One of Jourde’s closest associates in his career as a magistrate, and a fellow Auvergnat, Tixier, was entrusted with the key position of Prosecutor-General of the Court of Appeal, a position he held until the end of the empire in 1814, while the Presidencies of the Court of Appeal remained in the hands of men like Costa and Botton; when Botton di Castellamonte was elevated to the Court of Cassation, in Paris, his place was taken by Peyretti di Condove, the son of one of the most distinguished magistrates of the monarchy. It was not as easy in the provinces, however. Here, Jourde’s main fear was that culture of political vendetta that had taken such deep root in subalpine society since the triennio would be left unchecked, or even exacerbated, because of a lack of impartial magistrates. Indeed, juries were never introduced into the Piedmontese departments, so prolonged were Jourde and Tixier’s fears of partiality in the region. There were soon

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signs, almost immediately after his departure, that Jourde’s work on the civil tribunals had not been successful. General Menou, who succeeded Jourdan as commander of the 27th Military Division and head of the security forces, told the Minister of Justice as early as May 1803: With the exception of the Tribunal of Appeal, almost all the others . . . are badly composed; in general, I receive very serious complaints daily . . . relating to wilful delays, to their partisan attitude, even to financial corruption, all of which goes on within the tribunals.8 The French Prosecutor on the Criminal Tribunal of Alessandria was even more worried about the conduct of the civil tribunals in his area, writing a year later: political opinions play a great part in their deliberations . . . and so, too often, in the decisions of the court . . . many people and, unhappily, several of my colleagues among them, far from being tired of the Revolution, are still eager for trouble and intrigue . . . This is the major cause of the repeated clashes and factionalism which occur in . . . so many official organs.9 Jourde admitted the faults of his work in the letter of 1805 cited above, citing the reluctance of many of the better candidates to come forward as the main reason for the poor composition of the tribunals. At the time, however, he was more frank about the lack of talent at his disposal beyond Turin. The Piedmontese tribunals remained sources of intrigue, mutual denunciation and political partisanship throughout the Napoleonic period, and it is more than clear that the French administrators like Menou and Delaistre, as well as Tixier, who inherited Jourde’s work were dissatisfied with it.10 Nevertheless, in the first years of French rule, there were practical reasons for allowing the local elites to dominate the civil tribunals to the extent they did. The most fundamental among them was the political reliability of the patriot faction, set beside the reluctance of the royalists to assume office, a reluctance based as much of genuine fear as ideological repugnance on the new regime. In the prevailing climate, when basic law and order were far from being properly restored, it is hardly surprising that the patriots

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dominated the local judiciary. Dal Pozzo was of their number, although his position as a member of that section of the ancien re´gime magistracy so favoured by Jourde probably helped him to advance his own network plausibly. Other practical factors also assisted the rise of the patriot elites in the provinces, in the face of the reservations of both the French and the ex-Senators of Turin. The compounding problems, as far as staffing the civil tribunals were concerned, were threefold. One, as already noted, was the sheer partisanship of the local elites, but another was the repugnance of the Turin magistracy to accept provincial posts they saw as demotions. The other was Jourde’s certainty of finding Frenchmen fit to fill judicial posts at even the lowest levels. This was not the same as there being a complete absence of French candidates, however. As Jourde told his superiors in 1803: As regards the civil tribunals, I cannot assume that the kind of Frenchman I want for them would decide to expatriate himself for such a modest salary, and I am on my guard against the danger of confiding such important posts to men who might not offer sufficient proofs of ability and, above all, of morality in a country where, I have to say, the name of France . . . is in need of genuine rehabilitation.11 A year earlier, he had been more specific: it is especially necessary to prevent individuals being sent to this country who were in Italy . . . as civilian employees during the war, most notably those who served in the military administration and the supply services, in a word, anyone close to the army.12 Jourde knew all too well that the conduct of the Army of Italy during the triennio had embittered the vast bulk of Piedmontese society through its brutal rape of the country, but he also drew on the unfortunate experience of the French annexation of the Rhineland, when distrust of the locals and the need for politically reliable magistrates had led the Directory to appoint men with these backgrounds, a policy which soon produced immense problems for the absorption of these departments into France. Indeed, it took the French years to rectify these initial

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decisions.13 There was only one attempt during the entire period of French rule to appoint a French magistrate to a Piedmontese civil tribunal, in contrast to their powerful presence on the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Courts. This came in early 1805, when one Rubat, a former councillor of the Parlement of Paris, was placed as a judge, and then as President, of the Civil Tribunal of Alessandria. Within a year, confronted by vicious opposition from his Piedmontese colleagues – all prote´ge´s of Dal Pozzo – he was forced out.14 It was a fundamental victory for the Piedmontese elites, however minor it seemed at the time. Above all, it was a victory for Dal Pozzo’s network.

Piedmont and Dal Pozzo after annexation, 1802 –9 Jourde’s initial policy, and the notable failure of Tixier’s sole attempt to reverse it in Alessandria, had fundamental consequences for the local judicial elites of Piedmont. They had, largely through Dal Pozzo in the eastern provinces, established a stranglehold on office, something quite unique in the Napoleonic empire. As time passed, non-Piedmontese came to occupy the post of public prosecutor in a few instances, but the vast majority of posts in the civil tribunals remained the preserve of the local elites. Those who came out from the lower levels of the senior courts of Turin were, in the main, local men returning to their power bases. As will be seen, the more ambitious among them – and there was a considerable number of them – were able to draw on their experience in the French legal system when new annexations in Italy after 1805 opened up the prospect of rapid, considerable promotions in the Ligurian, Tuscan and Roman departments. No other annexed region was able to gain so tight a grip on local power within the judiciary as Piedmont. In the Rhineland, the French sought to replace unsuitable Frenchmen with Alsatians or, more frequently, with men who had served in the Parlement of Metz, from Lorraine. As will be seen, local participation in the courts of the rest of Italy was always circumscribed by the presence of Frenchmen and Piedmontese in key positions on civil tribunals. By the time of the annexation of the Netherlands, the Hanseatic cities and the projected annexation of Catalonia to France in 1811, the posts of public prosecutor and of President of civil tribunals, to say nothing of the senior courts, had become clearly stated government policy: an imperial decree of 14 July 1811 stated that,

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insofar as possible, all public prosecutors and first presidents of all tribunals, from Courts of Appeal through to those of first instance, were to be Frenchmen in the newly annexed departments. The Piedmontese were left alone to prosper and then to advance into the rest of Italy. This was in no small part Dal Pozzo’s doing, based on the confidence Jourde had shown in him in the initial, crucial period of French rule. He would continue to exercise this considerable influence after Jourde’s departure in 1803, thanks to the continued confidence of Tixier, the Prosecutor-General of the Court of Appeal, and the most powerful figure in the Piedmontese courts. This led to the perpetuation of the division between the ex-senators and the provincial magistrates, so entrenched under the monarchy, by other means. Unlike the clear institutional divisions of the ancien re´gime, however, the rival patronage networks that developed under the French split along lines within the old Senate and the Chamber of Accounts, dividing the higher magistrates, who had their own prote´ge´s within the Court of Appeal and the civil tribunal of Turin, and Dal Pozzo and Rocca, who had held lower posts in the higher courts of the old order, but who sprang from closely knit provincial networks they were determined to further. There were cases, even late in the period, when the political reliability of the provincial patriot networks could still justify Tixier’s reliance on Dal Pozzo and Rocca. In 1810, the presidency of the civil tribunal of Vercelli became vacant on a temporary basis, and a minor power struggle ensued between the patronage networks to fill it. Peyretti di Condove, now the First President of the Court of Appeal and a scion of one of the greatest families of the ancien re´gime magistracy, proposed The´ophile Langosco as his clear preference in the following terms: ‘This venerable magistrate is of very high birth. His family is one of the most illustrious and distinguished in the country.’ He added that Langosco was loyal to the government, although he had had not, to date, served in the judiciary.15 His own Prosecutor-General, Tixier, challenged this view of Langosco, and left him off the shortlist altogether. His own researches showed how difficult a man Langosco had been under the monarchy, mainly regarding his personal life, but the principal reason for rejecting him went back to the early years of French rule: My first reason is something common to all those members of the magistracy of the former regime who, until now, have stood aside

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from accepting judicial posts, and now come forward, nine years after the new organization, to establish their rival claims to the highest posts that they have so long disdained, challenging those who have filled posts as judges in the tribunals, and who have covered these posts with zeal and ability, and who have learned the principles of the new legislation, who have acquired the correct knowledge of it to assure the exact observation of the rules of procedure on which it depends; conversely, however much these magistrates of the old order try to appear ready to serve, it is difficult to imagine that they will abandon the old maxims, or the abusive practices and unworthy restrictions which they are so used to, as opposed to practicing the existing legislation and our forms of procedure16 The matter that raised his indignation is the reluctance of men like Langosco to serve when they were needed, and what emerges is a residual loyalty to ‘Dal Pozzo’s men’ who, for all their political partisanship and professional shortcomings, came forward in dangerous times to do dangerous jobs. Tixier had, by 1810, acquired a genuine loyalty to the Piedmontese provincial patriots, and was prepared to challenge one of the most admired jurists in the region in such terms. Moreover, Tixier’s closing remarks emphasise the changing reputation of the Piedmontese magistrates, stressing their ability to learn to work well in the French system, and to master its procedures, as well as its actual laws. Tixier’s emphatic defence of ‘Dal Pozzo’s men’ was timely, as shall be seen, because 1810 was the moment when these same Piedmontese, through the direct influence of Dal Pozzo, would enter the courts of the new Roman departments in force. Cotta, the department’s deputy to the Corps Le´gislatif in Paris, was the one who raised Langsoco’s reputation as a residual royalist, for all Peyretti’s protestations to the contrary.17 Quite quickly, Tixier was able to sweep Peyretti’s man aside in Vercelli, and the choice became one between a local judge, Prina, who was closely linked to Dal Pozzo, and Mottura, who was a judge on the civil tribunal of Alba and a prote´ge´ of Rocca. In this case, Rocca won the patronage battle. Tixier considered Prina the obvious choice in many ways, but there was still too much of the partisanship and bullying of the early years about him: ‘his good qualities are tarnished by an uncompromising character which has

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often led former presidents of the tribunal to complain about him’. Nevertheless, it was a wider victory for the early work of Dal Pozzo, as well as Rocca, in the fraught early years. The appointment of Mottura was a victory for the ‘Rocca network’, in that he was Rocca’s cousin, and he would be joining another cousin, Pollano, in Vercelli, described by Cotta as ‘mediocre’.18 Cotta suggested bringing in someone from another court, but to no avail. As will be seen, this may have appeared a reversal for Dal Pozzo as a powerbroker in the judicial system, but it was nothing of the kind. Unlike Rocca, by 1809, with his appointment as the commissioner for the new tribunals of the Roman departments, Dal Pozzo would open up far wider horizons and richer prizes for ‘his men’ than a temporary post in Vercelli. Until 1809, however, Dal Pozzo had to contend with both equals like Rocca and his ‘betters’ led by Botton and Peyretti. He did so largely by indirect means. Dal Pozzo, himself, did not follow the career path he had so skilfully created for so many of his friends, relatives or clients in the years of direct rule from Paris. Like Rocca, Dal Pozzo’s actual position in the Piedmontese judicial hierarchy after Jourde’s departure was far from prepossessing on the surface. From 1802 to 1808, he served as a substitute prosecutor on the Tribunal, the Court of Appeal in Turin,19 although, as has been seen, his opinions on appointment continued to be highly valued by Tixier, with whom he worked very closely in these years. In a letter to Bigot-Pre´meaux, a future Minister of Religion, and soon to be entrusted with the organisation of justice in the newly annexed Ligurian departments, Dal Pozzo confided his disappointment with his position. He stressed to Bigot that he had suffered a demotion under the French, but in truth, his post corresponded approximately to the one he had held under the monarchy. Nonetheless, Dal Pozzo was obviously disappointed with his situation, after having wielded such power under Jourde, however he disguised it: ‘I had a certain repugnance in accepting the role of Subsitute-Prosecutor on the Court of Appeal . . . I would have preferred that of a more tranquil judge, as I had my family’s affairs to see to.’20 In truth, the post of a judge was far superior to the one he held. In the same letter, he remarked that both Jourde and Botton di Castellamonte had encouraged him in his hopes to become a ProsecutorGeneral. The high praise Jourde heaped on Dal Pozzo, noted above, came in the context Dal Pozzo had expressed in 1805, when rumours spread that Tixier wanted to return to France and that his post might become

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vacant. Jourde’s high opinion of Dal Pozzo was obvious, but when he asserted that all the other members of the Council of Justice shared his opinions, he may not have been correct. In 1805, Botton was asked by Paris for a shortlist of candidates for the post of Prosecutor-General for the new Court of Appeal of Genoa. Botton made La Grave, the French Prosecutor of the Criminal Court of Cuneo, his clear first choice, and Dal Pozzo did not factor on his list.21 Many of Dal Pozzo’s prote´ge´s would rise to high positions in the Ligurian courts in time, but he failed to profit from this first phase of French expansion. Later, in 1808– 9, he expressed interest in a senior position in the new courts for the Tuscan departments, and was shortlisted for the First presidency of the new Court of Appeal of Florence.22 Nevertheless, the clear favourite of the Court of Appeal of Turin, who was appointed, was Montiglio. Like Dal Pozzo, Montiglio had risen through the middle ranks of the old Senate. He had distinguished himself for his willingness in 1801 to assume the post of prosecutor on the civil tribunal of Vercelli, where he obviously distinguished himself in the eyes of his superiors in Turin and Paris, for in 1807, he was promoted to the post of judge on the Court of Appeal of Paris,23 from whence he went to Florence. His reference from the First President of the Parisian Court of Appeal was glowing: It would be impossible to make a better choice. As a former magistrate in Piedmont, he possesses the knowledge of Roman law and he has studied French law at the Court of Appeal of Paris. He loves his work, he has a very direct personality, intelligence and integrity . . . He is utterly French at heart.24 Montiglio was obviously regarded as the most completely assimilated of all the Piedmontese magistrates below the highest echelons of the Turin elite, but his appointment opened the Tuscan courts to his own patronage, and from 1809 onwards, many key posts in the senior courts and on the civil tribunals were awarded to men linked to Peyretti, Botton and to Montiglio, himself. Tuscany became, up to a considerable degree, the ‘fief’ of one Piedmontese network. Until his appointment to Rome, in 1809, Dal Pozzo was losing the battle for patronage in the empire. Nonetheless, he was not without sources of influence, beyond the support of Jourde and Tixier. Dal Pozzo soon fell back on his provincial roots to become elected a deputy to the

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Corps Le´gislatif in 1805 for his native department, Marengo, where his family’s traditional power base, Moncalvo, was located. He subsequently used his position in Paris to become a Maıˆtre des Requeˆtes on the Council of State, without doubt the most powerful organ of Napoleonic government. This office was one of potential influence, rather than power or enormous responsibility. The Napoleonic Maıˆtres des Requeˆtes served only to prepare and present papers for discussion at the Council of State; they were not allowed to intervene in its debates or contribute to any discussions beyond questions posed to them about the dossiers for which they were responsible.25 Nevertheless, being a Maıˆtre des Requeˆtes allowed Dal Pozzo direct access to the real corridors of power, bringing him into direct contact with the highest officials in the empire, while still allowing him to continue on the Court of Appeal in Turin, for he was only called to Paris when needed. It is impossible to know with precision how Dal Pozzo used this post or his visits to Paris, but when the next major opportunity for advancement presented itself as Napoleon expanded his Italian possessions, Dal Pozzo’s name leapt forward quickly, for more senior posts than he had ever been considered for seriously, hitherto. When the decision to annex the Papal States was taken in 1809, he became an integral member of the Consulta`, the executive body set up to organise the two new departments. He took his chance with both hands.

The first Piedmontese annexation of Rome, 1809 –13 The appointments, first of Montiglio to organise and then lead the French judicial system in Tuscany, soon followed by the choice of Dal Pozzo to carry out the same functions for the Roman departments, marked the high point of Piedmontese fortunes under the Napoleon. These appointments were the clearest sign given by the most senior authorities in Paris that the subalpine magistracy was sufficiently ‘Gallicised’ to carry out the task of introducing and directing an alien judicial system in alien territory. It was an acknowledgement that the entire Piedmontese judiciary were, effectively, French, whether they were entirely the products of the higher courts of Turin, like Montiglio, or men from essentially provincial backgrounds with a grounding in the higher courts of the old order, like Dal Pozzo. Taken together, it marked the vindication of the initial faith Jourde had placed in the lower ranks of

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the Senate of Turin, which was the common professional bond between Montiglio and Dal Pozzo. In reality, however, this moment of triumph would rapidly unravel for Dal Pozzo in Rome, in direct contrast to the continued success of Montiglio, in Florence. The nuances in their backgrounds, under both the Savoyard monarchy and the French, proved as crucial to their fortunes in their respective fiefs, as the rather different local circumstances they had to confront. Between 1809 and 1813, both men were given the opportunity to prove to the regime just how acculturated they actually were, by delivering as complete a transformation of Tuscan and Roman justice from their respective ancien re´gimes to the Napoleonic model as possible. Ultimately, Paris deemed Dal Pozzo to have failed in this, and Montiglio to have succeeded, if not without significant shortcomings. Part of the reason for this was in their ancien re´gime backgrounds: Dal Pozzo was still, in many important respects, more the provincial notable than the Torinese togato; he remained more concerned with exercising patronage than ensuring that the ‘unbreakable’ French model was thoroughly imposed on the Romans. His provincial roots influenced his appointments not just in terms of personnel, but in how he measured where local men were needed, and where outsiders were best equipped to administer justice. His instincts were still those of a provincial judge of the old order, in that he sought to grant more autonomy to the lowest levels of the hierarchy, mainly the justice of the peace, rather than to seek to control them more tightly. Montiglio, in contrast, began from the mentality of the Torinese togato, that men from the lower courts in Tuscany were not capable to rising high, that local justice had to be closely supervised by the higher courts, if the new system was to work, so alien was it to men versed only in local statutes, as in Piedmont before the revolution. This was how their ancien re´gime backgrounds influenced them, once placed in positions of independent authority: Dal Pozzo was still governed by the instincts of the past, whereas Montiglio drew on them as forms of experience not to be replicated, but to serve as guides in his dealings with the Tuscans. That is, Montigilio was by far the more Gallicised of the two commissioners, in that his primary goal was to establish the French system, while extracting from it what advantages he could for his Piedmontese clients and prote´ge´s, whereas Dal Pozzo, at least in the

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eyes of his superiors, came to be regarded as almost the exact reverse. Something of this difference is also to be found in their experiences under the French, as well as their pre-revolutionary backgrounds. Montiglio’s rise within the judiciary was nothing short of a triumph of professionalism and acculturation. His appointment to the Paris Court of Appeal marked him out as the ‘magistrate’s magistrate’ among the Piedmontese; this appointment was probably only surpassed by that of Botton di Castellamonte to the Court of Cassation. Dal Pozzo had a more chequered rise, which owed more to political connections than professional opinion, the confidence shown in him by Jourde and Tixier notwithstanding. Montiglio was chosen by senior magistrates for his role in Tuscany, whereas Dal Pozzo relied on his extra-judicial contacts in the Council of State and his links to the Piedmontese senators. As shall be seen, Dal Pozzo had the unique ignominy of being the only imperial commissioner for the organisation of justice in the history of the Napoleonic empire to have his work subjected to scrutiny by the Court of Cassation, in the person of Joseph Coffinhal-Dunoyer, one of its longest serving councillors who was sent to Rome to investigate Dal Pozzo’s work in 1809. When put under Coffinhal’s experienced, uncompromising cross-examination, Paris soon found Dal Pozzo to be wanting not just in professional judgement or ability, but in the degree of his acculturation of French moeurs. When the question of permanent appointments to the Court of Appeal – soon to be the Imperial Court, in 1811 – not only Coffinhal, but the entire senior magistracy of Turin turned on Dal Pozzo, and worked with Coffinhal to appoint one of their own, Cavalli d’Olivola, the son of a First President of the Senate and himself a President of Turin’s Court of Appeal,26 thus blocking Dal Pozzo’s hope of emulating Montiglio who had remained as First President of the Court of Appeal in Florence when the reorganisation was completed. As will be seen, when Dal Pozzo fell, so did many of his Piedmontese prote´ge´s. All this was the judgement of Paris, however. Dal Pozzo arrived in Rome with one of the most challenging tasks ever assigned to an imperial servant under Napoleon, that of transforming the Roman judicial system into a clone of that of Napoleonic France. In brief, Dal Pozzo was expected entirely to remodel the system of justice in western Europe that was most alien to that of France, and to do so in record time. Jourde had been given almost two years to carry out his work in

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Piedmont in 1801– 3, and he had, as has been seen, been able to count on the help of many of the best legal minds of the old order in his work. In contrast, Napoleon wanted the Civil Code published within weeks of Dal Pozzo’s arrival in Rome, and the French judicial system in operation within a year.27 This was not helped by the refusal of most of the Roman legal classes to join his equivalent of Jourde’s Council of Justice or, later, by their refusal to accept posts under the French. Indeed, most of the senior magistrates in the Papal States were not laymen, but senior clerics drawn from the College of Cardinals, almost all of whom had defied the French and were leading a very successful campaign of peaceful civil disobedience to the French occupation, which ended with most of them being sent into exile and imprisonment.28 The French judicial system was widely unpopular in many parts of the annexed territories of the empire for a wide number of different reasons, but only the head of the Papal States, Pope Pius VII, had the moral authority to condemn the Civil Code as blasphemous for its secular vision of society, which he did in the clearest possible terms on the eve of the French invasion and his own arrest and deportation, calling it: a Code which is not only opposed to the Holy canons, but to the very precepts of the Gospels; it has introduced a new order which tends to identify sects and superstition with the Catholic Church.29 The entire population of the two new departments took this seriously, and no body of laymen more so than exactly those men Dal Pozzo needed most, the 306 curiali, the most senior lay magistrates of the country. They refused to take the oath of loyalty to the new regime or to serve in the new courts, thus hampering Dal Pozzo to an enormous degree. By July 1811, as the new Imperial Court was being created to replace the smaller Court of Appeal, in line with the rest of the empire, French frustration with the curiali exploded. Fifty of the Roman curiali – ‘chosen from among the most eminent’ – were arrested in the dead of night, and their properties sequestered. Eventually, because of the pressure on their families, 36 of them broke down and took the oath; the 14 who held out were exiled to Corsica.30 On the last day of October 1811, the Minister of Justice referred to ‘the collective defiance of a whole corporation’ and did not rule out further action against the 36

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who were still in Rome, the amnesty they were due to be granted the next day notwithstanding.31 Legonidec, the French Prosecutor-General of the Imperial Court of Rome, and an outspoken critic of much of Dal Pozzo’s work for the new organisation in 1809, had to admit that those curiali best disposed to serve in the French courts were not ‘the most esteemed among them’; rather, the best jurists were exactly those who defied the French the longest.32 The final crisis over the curiali actually reached this climax just after Dal Pozzo’s own departure from Rome to take up his new post as First President of the Imperial Court of Genoa; he was on his way there in the last week of June 1811.33 The wider point to be drawn from this chronology is the light it sheds on the magnitude of the problems facing Dal Pozzo in simply trying to find anyone to cover the basic needs of administration of justice: the most serious aspects of the crisis were far from resolved even after his departure, and they impeded his work from the beginning to the end of his two years and three months in Rome. On 31 December 1810, just before the Consulta` ended its existence and handed over to the new French administration it had created, Dal Pozzo drew attention to the worrying state of the judiciary, where many posts were still vacant. He openly feared the breakdown of the administration of justice: The repugnance of some to take the oath, the opposition of others simply to the new order of things, the insouciance and extreme apathy of a great many others, still, when it is a question of unpaid posts (such as that of justice of the peace or substitute judge) taken together, leads to a lack of good replacements (for the existing vacancies).34 The Consulta` had to pass a decree to fill the vacant posts provisionally to keep the courts working at all, in order to allow magistrates not to take the oath, although this effectively conserved many men they thought unfit in office.35 By the decree of 20 April, 1810, the Consulta` reduced the number of judges on the civil tribunals from five to four, departing from French norms in an effort to cope with the shortage of candidates.36 The problems at the lowest level of the hierarchy, that of the justices of the peace, simply saw Dal Pozzo stand back from reform. He perpetuated both the ancien re´gime territorial jurisdictions of the city of Rome and its hinterland, the Agro Romano, and left in place the

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papal legislation of 1790 which allowed the justices of the peace to remain the last source of appeal for any cases of a value of less than 50 scudi, an arrangement in complete contradiction of French norms, as Coffinhal was quick to point out, even if he had some sympathy for Dal Pozzo’s predicament. Even in his criticism, however, Coffinhal was forced to admit that some of the best magistrates in the Papal States were the Roman justices of the peace.37 He did not find it so beyond the city, however: many candidates for justices of the peace in the rural cantons have been chosen from Rome, among men who have neither means, nor good family, nor respect, and who simply want to live off the profits of the fees attached to their posts, something which provokes many complaints, and this poor example is being widely imitated because public servants in the Roman states impose what they call ‘the uncertain’ (on those who use their legal services), which amounts to the arbitrary, illegal profits attached to the fixed revenues of their posts.38 Coffinhal was even more damning about what he found in the civil tribunals, for two distinct reasons: ‘the judges who compose (the civil tribunals) are generally poorly educated, and enjoy no personal respect . . . Beyond the failings of ignorance, the judges of the Roman starts are generally corrupt.’39 Coffinhal condemned the results of Dal Pozzo’s work in these matters, but he was well aware of the difficulties he faced. When examined in detail, the problems confronting Dal Pozzo make those of Jourde, almost a decade earlier, seem relatively insignificant. Nonetheless, Dal Pozzo’s instincts as a Piedmontese padrone could not but see his new position as an opportunity, and it was these instincts, more than the failings of the local magistrates he appointed, that led him to fall foul of his Parisian masters. Coffinhal’s report damned Dal Pozzo to Paris less for the poor quality of the Romans he was forced to appoint, than his Piedmontese ancien re´gime penchant for nepotism and clientismo, and for being drawn into Roman corruption, as well. Almost ironically, given the shortage of good candidates readily acknowledged by Coffinhal and his other critics, Dal Pozzo was condemned for appointing large numbers of Piedmontese to judicial posts, something which angered the Romans. More than this,

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however, on close inspection, first Coffinhal, and then the French jurists he brought in to replace Dal Pozzo’s appointments, exposed the lack of competence, of acculturation to the French system, among the very Piedmontese Paris had hitherto seen as more than capable of introducing their judicial system to the new territories. There is no question that Dal Pozzo turned to his relatives, allies and clients in filling the key posts in the new Roman courts. Although posts as judges were difficult to fill with outsiders, those of public prosecutor were normally considered by the French as perfect for an external influence, particularly in the annexed territories. The public prosecutor had two main duties: to prosecute cases in the interests of the state, and also to maintain the internal discipline of the court he served on. The latter role assumed great importance in areas where French procedures and statutes were entirely new. Thus, when Dal Pozzo appointed non-Romans to virtually every post of public prosecutor in the new departments, he was only following well-established government policy. However, this was not perceived as normal by the Romans, and it caused problems for the French they could not ignore. The appointment of so many Piedmontese alienated the Romans, causing even the French prosecutor of the Court Appeal of Rome to advise Paris that, however able the Piedmontese might be, enough was enough.40 A more general, apparently blander remark on Dal Pozzo’s work was all the more damning. On the eve of the creation of the new Imperial Court, Legonidec said simply that, ‘in the new structures, it will be very important to have capable men as public prosecutors, because honesty, of itself, is not enough’.41 No one doubted the political loyalty of their Piedmontese colleagues, nor their commitment to furthering the imperial presence in Italy. Indeed, French complaints about Dal Pozzo’s ‘empire building’ among his compatriots, and his alleged cronyism, denote almost too enthusiastic a devotion to the pursuit of imperial expansion. Nepotism did not automatically spell incompetence. A close relative of Dal Pozzo, Pinelli, became the prosecutor of Rome’s Criminal Court; he was thought ‘honest and above reproach’ by Coffinhal, and did the job as well as any Frenchman.42 Nevertheless, Pinelli, exposed to Roman conditions, could readily revert to Piedmontese practices. The provenance of most of Dal Pozzo’s appointments guaranteed their political loyalty. Almost all came from the tightly knit patriot circles of the eastern provinces of Piedmont: Vercelli, Alessandria and Casale, areas marked by a preponderance of

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bourgeois elements loyal to the new order, and had been brought together first on the Civil Tribunal of Alessandria, and then promoted by Dal Pozzo to the new Ligurian courts after 1805. They tended to occupy the lower and middle ranks of the hierarchy, while the jurists of the royal Senate first appointed by Jourde to the Cour d’Appel of Turin tended to dominate the new senior courts of Genoa, Florence and Rome. However, among the lower ranks, some of the least acceptable habits of the old order were reproduced on new terrain. Pinelli, a product of the lower provincial courts, was clearly at odds with the ethos of French criminal justice when he suggested that the seemingly uncatchable bandits along the Neapolitan border be granted safe conducts and the promise of immunity by the Consulta`, if they would disperse and turn over their accomplices.43 This slip serves as reminder of the other factor common to all the legal systems of the Italian old order: the vast gulf between the central and peripheral magistracies. Pinelli revealed his origins to be emphatically in the latter, where the ferocious royal codes actually meant very little in the world of ‘government at one remove’.44 Paris stamped on his suggestion: immunity would be granted only to brigands who gave themselves up freely, and made a direct contribution to the capture of the rest of their bands.45 Traditional reflexes were not always in line with the widely held, and often correct, vision the French had that the severity of the Reali Costituizioni invariably inured the Piedmontese to the weakness so prevalent among Roman and Tuscan magistrates. It depended on which sort of Piedmontese was involved. French contempt for their most loyal, and longest-standing, Italian collaborators was not about political reliability. Worryingly, it went far deeper. Their preoccupation was increasingly with the inability of the Piedmontese to grasp the spirit, as opposed to the workings, of the French state. Much criticism of the Piedmontese public prosecutors in the Tuscan and Roman departments was of their clannishness, and their severe – if competent – application of French penal legislation, rather than a poor grasp of the Civil Code. According to their immediate superior, Legonidec, the French prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Rome, in 1810: I believe these gentlemen to be honest, and well versed in criminal law, but they have little experience in civil matters; they have no

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presence in court, and no real personal bearing, which is so useful for making an impression.46 Legonidec recounted the particular virtues the Piedmontese could bring to Napoleonic service, but also to the liabilities they had in common with all other Italian magistrates who were thrust suddenly from the inquisitorial to the post-revolutionary legal culture of the public trial. The French were generally correct in supposing the severity of the reali Costituzioni disposed the Piedmontese to the Code, and they certainly adapted better than Tuscans habituated to the Leopoldine reforms. This was not enough for the French, however. These were, by and large, the men Coffinhal demanded should be removed, and this work was undertaken by Legonidec, who took over as Prosecutor-General of the new Imperial Court of Rome on Coffinhal’s departure to organise the courts of the new Illyrian provinces, modern Slovenia and Croatia. This single appointment was, in fact, the most damning condemnation of Dal Pozzo’s work imaginable. The most important aspect of the ‘purge’ Coffinhal sought for the Court of Appeal was the removal of its prosecutor, and his replacement by Legonidec. The man replaced was Castagneri, one of Dal Pozzo’s closest prote´ge´s, who had served with him as a Substitute Prosecutor on the Court of Appeal of Turin and, like Pinelli, was also his relative. This was Coffinhal’s assessment of him: His honesty is undeniable, his conduct is above reproach, but I cannot hide the fact that he cuts a figure that is not suitable for the post he occupies . . . he is very timid. This disability is not compensated by any other quality. M Castagneri has only moderate abilities and a very ordinary education; above all, he has very little knowledge of our legislation . . . which is essential in a country newly reunited to the Empire. M Castagneri is not a Frenchman of the interior (France before 1789) by birth, and he shares all the same views as other ultramontanes (Italians) to the extent that those duties of a prosecutor-general which deal with police surveillance would be paralysed, and the work of the Government would be neutralized in his hands. He would use his authority to prevent recourse to the higher courts in the metropole (Paris) . . . no denunciations about the violations of French law

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would reach either the Minister of Justice or the ProsecutorGeneral of the Court of Cassation. As a consequence, our legislation would only acquire a very weak authority (in Rome). Our laws would not be used in the tribunals, where canon law would still prevail, that of the old Roman courts composed of prelates. The remedy to this problem is the nomination of a Prosecutor-General from the interior of the Empire.47 This is exactly what happened, with the arrival of Legonidec. As Paolo Alvazzi del Frate has said, Legonidec’s appointment was a real turning point and marked the beginning of the end not just for Dal Pozzo, but for the Piedmontese in Rome, as far as was possible. Legonidec was meant to be, and soon became, the single most influential figure in the Roman justice system.48 His concrete influence was seen in his imposition of discipline within the magistracy, and the arrival of Frenchmen as public prosecutors in place of Dal Pozzos’ men. He became a determining influence in appointments, promotions, transfers, and dismissals. He had good contacts and influence in Paris, and he used them to undo as much of Dal Pozzo’s work as he could. Dal Pozzo, predictably, defended his handiwork to Paris, noting the high calibre of the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Courts, but adding that the civil tribunals had also proved themselves. However, even he had to admit that there was a very thin base of talent to draw upon among the lower tribunals and for the justices of the peace, especially on the periphery; the new prosecutors had had to purge the original justices of the peace chosen by the Consulta`, to set things on a proper basis.49 This was, of itself, quite a confession of initial failure, but it is dwarfed by the continuous flood of complaints about the Roman magistrates in the years that followed. It was not only Dal Pozzo’s lack of ability to choose his men that drew Coffinhal’s fire, but his own inability to break with Piedmontese legal habits when confronted with Roman practices that broadly corresponded to them. Very early in his time in Turin, Jourde had a rare confrontation with the Torinese togati on the Council of Justice about ‘the established practices which sow the seeds of destruction in the Costituzioni through the inveterate abuse of the royal prerogative which has been carried to absurd excess’.50 By this, Jourde meant that the royal prerogative was used almost at will to reopen or to overturn judgements given by the

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Senate, the highest Court of Appeal, thereby making a mockery of the system. He was well aware that this was not the view of even his most erudite Piedmontese collaborators. Dal Pozzo, at least according to Coffinhal and Legonidec, had not shaken off this mentality in the intervening decade. Coffinhal, like Jourde before him in Piedmont, lambasted Roman ancien re´gime justice for allowing cases which have come to the last source of appeal to be reopened: What is even more remarkable . . . is that the former government admitted the appeal as a revision which went against the same judgement made in the last resort, without making any distinctions between provisional or definitive judgements (by the lower courts).51 He was shocked even more that the Consulta`, following Dal Pozzo’s advice, continued to allow this. Coffinhal objected to the whole principle of ancien re´gime cases being allowed appeal under the legislation of new system. This was Dal Pozzo’s fault, and it was a clear sign of his lack of acculturation to French norms. There was more to it than just old prejudices, according to Coffinhal, however. He went to say that many of the cases Dal Pozzo had allowed to be reopened involved the Princess Chigi, a prominent and very attractive member of Roman high society with whom Dal Pozzo was involved. Whether their liaison was sexual or not is impossible to prove, but it seemed clear enough to many observers that he was ‘in her pocket’; this compromised his personal conduct as well as his professional abilities. Dal Pozzo was said by Coffinhal to have acted in similar manner in cases involving other female aristocrats, notably the Princess Sciarra, a relative of the powerful Colonna family. The problems these friendships produced for Dal Pozzo went further, still, however. The few Romans Dal Pozzo did appoint brought him more opprobrium than those he pushed aside for his compatriots, because they were felt to be the result of these same liaisons. An anonymous denunciation went so far as to say that: The only men who get posts were those supported by the Princess Chigi, or by some other beautiful woman; in a manner of speaking, it is the women who hand out posts in Rome, not the Consulta`.52

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Coffinhal was less direct, but he did express concerns that these personal friendships were, indeed, influencing judicial appointments, as well as the course and character of justice, itself.53 Criticism of Dal Pozzo was not confined to Coffinhal or Legonidec, who had been sent to Rome to inspect his work. Camille de Tournon, a member of the Consulta` and the future Prefect of Rome, had little faith in Dal Pozzo. He thought Dal Pozzo ‘polished and full of good intentions . . . but naturally timid, with little confidence in his own abilities’.54 It all added up to the exposure of one of the leading Piedmontese collaborators in the Napoleonic imperial project as a weak, only partially acculturated man, unfit for the task he had been assigned. More important, still, Dal Pozzo’s failure was but the most serious element in the exposure of a whole section of the Piedmontese elites, the patriot provincial notables, as unacculturated to French legal culture, and incapable of high office. By June, 1811, Dal Pozzo left Rome for his new post as First President of the Court of Appeal of Genoa, the highest he would acquire under Napoleon, but not the last. It was a very high promotion, seen in strict terms of judicial employment, his last official post being that of a substitute prosecutor in Turin, yet it was also something of an escape and a sign of failure, given his ambitions in Rome. Seen from the outside, 1811 appears to mark the triumph of Piedmontese domination of the administration of justice in Napoleonic Italy. A Piedmontese jurist was now the First President of all four of the Imperial Courts in the de´partements re´unis: Peyretti di Condove in Turin, Montiglio in Florence, Cavalli d’Olivola in Rome and, finally, Dal Pozzo in Genoa. It is the ‘finally’ that truly matters, however. Dal Pozzo’s failure to secure the presidency of Rome, and the selection of Cavalli d’Olivola over his claims, marks the triumph of the higher echelons of the doyens of the Senate of Turin over the provincial notables. What on the surface suggests the domination of the Piedmontese in Napoleonic Italy in fact represents the realisation by the central government in Paris, that only one section of the Piedmontese judicial elite, the patricians of the old Senate, were truly acculturated and fit to lead the rest of the peninsula into the French system. Dal Pozzo arrived in Genoa as the standard bearer of a defeated faction. From the outset, the French despaired of all but a few of the Piedmontese ‘at home’, as has been seen, but their persistent complaints made no impact on the central ministries. Successive Ministers of Justice continued to see the

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Piedmontese as fully integrated and acculturated in the ways of the codes, to the point that they felt secure in sending them to dominate the senior courts of the Ligurian departments in 1805, and serve in the Tuscan and Roman departments, after 1808. The strength of Parisian faith in the Piedmontese was manifested most clearly by their presence on the Tuscan Giunta and the Roman Consulta`. With Coffinhal and Legonidec’s exposure of Dal Pozzo and his appointees, however, that illusion was now shattered. French public prosecutors now arrived in the Roman departments to replace the Piedmontese, while at the most senior levels of the new Imperial Courts, the Piedmontese First Presidents found themselves with French Prosecutor-Generals at their sides. For the Romans, the Piedmontese simply kept them out of jobs. By 1811, Legonidec concluded that he preferred Frenchmen with good Italian in these posts, as they seemed to arouse less resentment among the Roman legal classes than the Piedmontese; he really wanted Romans serving their own region, but ‘I would probably have a great deal of trouble in training and supervising them’.55 Legonidec confirmed Coffinhal’s initial judgement that, ‘these appointments have irritated the locals, who have little respect for the Piedmontese . . . They would even prefer Frenchmen’.56 The success of ralliement and then amalgame, in one region, appeared to thwart it in another. Ultimately, the French thought the advantages of using the Piedmontese outweighed the problems. Under Napoleonic rule, a clear pattern eventually emerged, in which all the most senior judgeships of the Courts of Appeal of Turin, Genoa, Florence and Rome fell to Piedmontese magistrates with backgrounds in the royal Senate or senior French courts, while all the prosecutors were French. This was an emphatic signal of the confidence the French had in a particular institution of the old order, the Senate of Turin, but it was an ill-judged affront to the togati of their other possessions, in a culture where the magistrate was held in particular esteem. The French monopoly of the post of prosecutor in the senior courts, and their shared tenure of it in the lower ones with the Piedmontese, was a powerful reminder that true integration, based on the spontaneous adoption of the ethos of the new order by its imperial subjects, was a very long way off. From an Italian perspective, the first experiment in Piedmontese rule of other parts of the peninsula had proved a disaster in Rome, and Dal Pozzo would soon learn at first hand that it had been not satisfactory in Liguria.

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Dal Pozzo in Liguria and Vercelli, 1811 –13 As Dal Pozzo’s struggles with Coffinhal intensified in Rome, and as Legonidec systematically dismantled as much of his work as possible, Dal Pozzo’s reputation within the higher echelons of the Napoleonic magistracy declined. Increasingly, his support centred almost solely on the political connections he had forged as a Maıˆtre des Requeˆtes. This became evident on his arrival in Genoa. Indeed, Dal Pozzo was not long in Genoa until he was recalled briefly to Rome to help with financial matters concerning the courts, and followed this with a period of leave to deal with personal matters. This drew the comment from the Public Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal, the French magistrate La Grave, that the Court, soon to become the core of the new Imperial Court, needed a leader who was constantly present. Dal Pozzo’s absences had not been good for the Court of Appeal, and it would be worse for its new successor: (the Imperial Court) needs a first president at its head from the moment it commences its work! The Court of Appeal has been without M Baron Dal Pozzo while on mission in Rome, and this lack of the senior magistrate is not without its problems.57 La Grave wrote this in September, 1811; Dal Pozzo set out for Genoa only in July.58 However, exactly the same thing happened three years later. Dal Pozzo once again returned to Rome on official business, this time to help liquidate the Chamber of Accounts, and followed it by personal leave in Moncalvo.59 However, in his following comments on Dal Pozzo, personally, La Grave, in the guarded way of lawyers, hinted at deeper reserves about his new superior: The evidence of the confidence His Majesty has in him . . . proves that his merits are well known and it would be useless to speak of the distinction with which he has fulfilled the various judicial posts he has held.60 The tone is far from enthusiastic; there is no mention of the opinions of his colleagues in Rome or elsewhere in the magistracy, nor is there any

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sign of enthusiasm at his arrival in Genoa. La Grave refers only to the continuing confidence of Napoleon himself in Dal Pozzo. A close examination of the correspondence of the new Imperial Court during Dal Pozzo’s leadership points to another consistent, if subtle sign of his declining standing as an imperial magistrate. When dealing with appointments before Dal Pozzo’s arrival, and with most other important business referred to the Ministry of Justice in Paris, La Grave had almost always composed joint letters with the first presidents of the Court, first Azuni and then Carbonara; it is obvious they worked closely together. In direct contrast, Dal Pozzo and La Grave maintained separate correspondences with Paris at all times. There is no sign whatsoever that they opposed each other directly, but compared to his relations with previous superiors, it is clear La Grave kept his distance from Dal Pozzo. Dal Pozzo inherited a complex situation in the Ligurian courts, which was in part of his own making. When Liguria had been annexed to the empire in 1805, a considerable amount of Piedmontese territory had been put under the authority of the new Court of Appeal in Genoa: the entire department of Marengo, and its tribunals in Alessandria, Casale and Asti, together with the former provinces – now arrondissements – of Ceva and Acqui, were added to the new department of Montenotte, ruled from Savona. This brought a considerable number of Piedmontese magistrates, many of them Dal Pozzo’s prote´ge´s, under Genoa and into competition with Ligurians for promotion in the new hierarchy. Once detached from the Court of Appeal of Turin, and thus no longer in competition with the former magistrates of the Senate and its adjunct courts, the provincial Piedmontese magistrates held distinct advantages over their Ligurian colleagues. They had worked in the French system for nearly five years by the time the new courts came into service in late 1805, whereas the new regime was entirely alien to the Ligurians. Nor was this just a matter of time served under a new regime. The Piedmontese judiciary had had its problems with the French model of justice, as has been seen, and the experience of working together in Rome had led the French there to think these problems were far from solved. Their attitude in Liguria was markedly different, however, and it worked directly in favour the Piedmontese. The French way was very different to that of the Savoyard monarchy, but it was not entirely alien. When the French annexed the Republic of St George, however, they could not possibly have found an area less attuned to their judicial

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system. Two examples of how alien the French felt about what they found bring this home. In 1811, when asked to supply Paris with the details of magistrates who might be the equivalent of French parlementaires, with a view to appointing them to the new Imperial Courts, the prefect of Genoa could but reply that Genoa had never had a professional magistracy or anything like a French parlement. The only way to meet such a request was to look among the great nobles, who had served on the Rota.61 This meant not only that there was no professional magistracy at the higher levels, but in the provinces, as well. In response to the same circular, the Prefect of Montenotte, based in Savona, told Paris: (there was) no manner of magistracy; rather, judicial power rested in the hands of the nobles of Genoa, who went out to the various localities every year and exercised justice there. The six candidates he put forward for membership of the new Imperial Court ‘all belong to the two arrondissements which were part of Piedmont’.62 This is a very revealing comment: when it came to promotion, the Piedmontese incorporated into the Ligurian courts were better viewed by the French than they were elsewhere in Italy, and rose, accordingly. Few Ligurians emerged to serve in the departments annexed later, and there were, relatively, very few in the upper echelons of their own courts, during 11 years of imperial rule. The Ligurians did not help their own cause, either. Whereas the Piedmontese could often draw criticism from Coffinhal and Legonidec in Rome, for being too harsh in their application of French criminal legislation, having been trained in the far tougher Costituzioni reali of the ancien re´gime, the Ligurians shunned involvement with the French criminal courts. Lebrun, who presided over the process of annexation, noted ‘a convinced repugnance for (French) criminal law’ among the Genoese barristers.63 This produced a quite different attitude to Piedmontese magistrates among the French in Liguria, from the hostility to them felt by Coffinhal and Legonidec in Rome. De Simon, the French public prosecutor of the civil tribunal of Savona, begged his superiors to appoint them in place of the locals: to assure the regularity of the service, and to give the tribunal consistency, there would be no more surer way than to replace half

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its members with Frenchmen or Piedmontese, who are better versed in French law, and could get the tribunal working quickly . . . this mixture would only be to the advantage of the public64 This attitude spread from bottom to top of the French magistrates in Liguria. Bigot-Pre´meaux, the magistrate charged with organising the Ligurian tribunals, shared De Simon’s views completely: It might be more convenient, and probably necessary, to appoint judges from the localities, and possibly even the presidents (of the tribunals). However, as for the public prosecutors, it is no less indispensable for the introduction of our laws, and so that they be properly understood, that the tribunals be guided by . . . either French or Piedmontese who . . . have become used to our laws and to working in both languages65 This combination circumstances led to the inexorable rise of the Piedmontese in the Ligurian courts but, their dislike of the new order notwithstanding, this domination created the same resentments as in Rome. Dal Pozzo inherited this when he arrived in 1811, although La Grave and Carbonara, who had acted as head on the Court temporarily, had done as much as possible to appoint Ligurians to the Imperial Court. In a long report to his superiors on the eve of the new organisation, La Grave outlined the shortcomings of his Ligurian colleagues, and how they derived from the historic absence of a professional magistracy. The dilemma was clear: there were very few of them truly fit for high office, yet to exclude too many of them from the new Imperial Court would be utterly discouraging for them, and a slap in the face to public opinion.66 Faced with this situation, it was hard for Dal Pozzo not to retain his instinctive desire to advance his own compatriots’ careers. He used the territorial argument as the clearest way to advance his own clients in the region he now headed, telling Paris in 1812, when asked who should become a senior judge of the Imperial Court: Molini is Genoese, but since a good half of the resort of the Imperial Court is composed of areas detached from Piedmont, it is essential that those who are natives of these places, as I am, myself,

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should have the same rights as the Genoese to posts on the Court that is common to them both.67 Instead, he pressed the claims of Azuni, who had already served capably as First President of the Court of Appeal. Dal Pozzo was more influenced by the fact that Azuni was a Sardinian, and had served in the Piedmontese courts under the monarchy, however. Dal Pozzo was far from alone in this. A year before his arrival, Costa, a member of the Napoleonic Senate, reminded the Ministry of Justice that 40 per cent of the resort of the Court of Appeal of Genoa was Piedmontese, and that: ‘Only three of the magistrates of the Court of Appeal have been drawn from the former states of the King of Sardinia, and that almost all the (Ligurian magistrates) with this status are ignorant of the jurisprudence of Piedmont.’68 As the scramble for posts on the new Imperial Court began, his colleague in the Napoleonic Senate, Marcorengo, took up the cause, telling the Ministry of Justice: Half of the population of the Court of Genoa is composed of former Piedmontese states, and it is of infinite importance for the administration of justice that that court should have a president who knows the laws and practices of Piedmont, and all its former jurisprudence.69 He got exactly this in Dal Pozzo, but these words were actually written as a reference for Brayda, a former Senator of Turin. In such a climate, it is perhaps remarkable that Dal Pozzo showed he had learned a great deal from his negative experiences in Rome, and he tempered the ample temptations before him to exercise padrinaggio in the promising circumstances of Liguria, even if he did not abandon them. In the last months of Napoleonic rule, the post of public prosecutor in La Spezia became vacant. This sensitive and powerful post had been reserved for Frenchmen or Piedmontese from the outset, and fell to Ligurians only out of lack of other candidates, but in July 1813 – in contrast to La Grave’s opinion – Dal Pozzo pressed the case of Luigi Roveretto, a very young Ligurian magistrate, only recently appoint a Conseiller-Auditeur to the Imperial Court. Conseiller-Auditeurs were posts created specifically to accelerate the careers of promising young men in the judiciary. Dal Pozzo made his case in terms which reveal how much he had altered his

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approach to imperial expansion since his experiences in Rome. Roveretto had a good claim to this difficult job: because of his birth, his wealth and his personal qualities. He has, in addition to these, political consideration in his favour, which seems to me to carry some weight. This is because Roveretto would be (if appointed) the first pupil to have graduated from the (French) lyce´e (of Genoa) to enter the magistracy; and this example would not be without encouragement to parents to send their children to the lyce´es.70 This single case, when set in the wider context of Dal Pozzo’s policies only two years previously shows the extent to which he had learned, if too late, from his career as an imperial administrator. By the time Dal Pozzo pressed Roveretto’s case, he had actually left Genoa to take up the post of President of the Civil Tribunal of Vercelli, in effect a very serious demotion, on which the archives remain silent. Dal Pozzo ended his career as a Napoleonic magistrate in a lower position than he had been given by Jourde in 1802. Worse was to follow, however.

Dal Pozzo under the Savoyard restoration, 1814 –21 There were few restorations as ferocious or determinedly reactionary as that carried out by the restored Savoyards between 1814 and 1821. Only Ferdinand VII in Spain matched Victor Emmanuel I in his determination simply to ignore the 18 years between his flight to Sardinia and the fall of Napoleon in 1814, and even Ferdinand retained some aspects of the Napoleonic reforms which enhanced his own power, nor had French rule lasted as long, or become so deeply embedded in the life of the country, as it had in Piedmont. Nevertheless, this policy of complete restoration – to the point of initially trying to reinstate the entire administration as it had been in 1797 – known as La Palmaverde – was undertaken with great determination. The Napoleonic magistracy and the French codes of law and procedure, as well as the court system they worked through, were among the most important casualties of La Palmaverde.71 At a stroke, the ‘empires’ so carefully built by Dal Pozzo, Rocca, and the grandees of the old Senate like Peyretti di Condove evaporated into thin air. Botton chose to remain in France after 1814.

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In contrast, Dal Pozzo, hastily restored as President of the Court of Appeal of Genoa to confront the crisis, led the official delegation that welcomed Victor Emmanuel back to the mainland. In his official declaration to the throne, Dal Pozzo remained unrepentant in his support for the French and for their judicial reforms, while stressing the magistracy’s desire to maintain order and protect property, expressing above all their desire to continue to serve the king. A week later, Victor Emmanuel issued an amnesty for all who had served the French and guaranteed the safety of their properties.72 That was as far as it went, however. Dal Pozzo’s brave gesture did not save his job or the French reforms. Dismissed from his post, along with all of his colleagues, he spent the years between the restoration and the revolution of 1821, which would send him into foreign exile, as a lawyer under the restored legal system of the old order. Resourceful as ever, Dal Pozzo found a way back into public life through three different routes. He became tutor to the ultimate – if still distant – heir to the throne, the Prince of Carignano, the future Charles Albert I, while simultaneously pursuing a career at the Turin bar where he specialised in cases where he felt he could best demonstrate the superiority of the Napoleonic codes over Savoyard legislation.73 However, it was his third endeavour that assured his lasting place among those who kept the cause of the Napoleonic vision of the state alive in Restoration Italy, and his success in this was tinged with no little irony. The French came to feel that their Italian administre´s were incapable of coping alone with the Code, certainly in the case of the Piedmontese in the Roman departments, led by Dal Pozzo. However, those Italian jurists who, in their turn, had come to respect the Napoleonic legal system deliberately filled the gap left by imperial tutelage by transforming Dal Pozzo from the semi-acculturated nuisance depicted by his French colleagues, into an intellectual leader.74 Through his copious, always anonymous, commentaries on legal current affairs, in a purely Italian context, rather than one imposed by the French, Dal Pozzo became at last a cultural intermediary and a serious person in the eyes of his peers. Between 1817 and 1819, he produced four anonymous volumes of commentaries – always hostile – on sentences pronounced by the reconstituted Senate of Turin. These Opsculi di un avvocato Milanese originario piemontese sopra varie quistioni politico-legali consolidated his position as the leading Italian authority on Napoleonic jurisprudence and as an acerbic critic of the existing system.75 His reputation was now

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pan-Italian – his Opsculi were not just published in Milan, but widely read there – in a positive sense, one quite different from that of the narrow minded Piedmontese padrone he had acquired among Romans and Ligurians when in a position of power under Napoleon. He was now a seer. Dal Pozzo thus became part of more general western European phenomenon in the post-Napoleonic world. In the Rhineland, another part of Europe long under Napoleonic rule, Georg Friedrich von Rebmann, in 1814 still the only non-French President on the Court of Appeal of Trier, fled to Bavaria in the unfounded fears that the Prussians would instigate a restoration not unlike that in Piedmont. In fact, the Prussians retained the French legal system in the Rhineland after 1814, but von Rebmann, in common with Dal Pozzo, continued to write extensively on jurisprudence for many years after 1814, always with the aim of extolling the merits of a Napoleonic codes and court system which had had its reservations about his own ability to work within it.76 Rebmann was fortunate in having a sympathetic Bavarian border to cross over, and even more so in having a regime in Munich to serve which perpetuated the reforms of the Napoleonic period. Joseph-Franc ois Beyts, the most senior jurisconsulte of the Belgian departments and the mastermind of the introduction of the French judicial system into the Netherlands and the Hanseatic departments – and one of the very few non-Frenchmen successive Ministers of Justice considered truly acculturated to the French system – chose to retire from the judiciary in 1814. Like Dal Pozzo and Rebmann, he continued to write and commentate, however.77 Rebmann’s flight from the Prussian Rhineland was precipitate, and Beyts’ decision was, perhaps, more political than professional, because his erstwhile colleague on the Napoleonic Court of Appeal at the Hague, Cornelis van Maanen, remained in high office under the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, and ensured that the details, as well as the essence, of the French legal reforms were retained.78 Dal Pozzo’s was by far the most difficult position in the postNapoleonic world, but he still left a deep imprint on the future legal culture of Italy, not through his work as a magistrate, and still less as an imperialist, but as truly constructive critic of the Restoration. His importation of his Piedmontese clients into the Roman departments augured ill for the post-Unification order; his tenure of high office in Rome and then Genoa drew only criticism from his French masters, but

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as a cultural intermediary, freed from intense pressure to conform to French norms in every detail, Dal Pozzo made his lasting, most significant mark on the future history of Italy. His vindication came in 1831, with the creation of the Albertine Code for the states of the House of Savoy, followed by its extension, in modified form, to the unitary state in 1860. Equally, Dal Pozzo also takes his place among a generation of jurisconsultes like Rebmann, Beyts and van Maanen who were crucial to the survival of the Napoleonic jurisprudence after 1814, to its wide dissemination and, above all, to its ready acceptance, by new generations of post-Napoleonic lawyers and magistrates. Dal Pozzo was one of the foremost members of a group of European public men who fostered the public sphere now common to so much of the modern European Union.

7 CULTURAL IMPERIALISM IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT?: POLITICAL CULTURE AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN NAPOLEONIC ITALY

T

he mutual hostility between rulers and ruled in Napoleonic Italy had obvious sources. The essentially colonial nature of their economic relationship is encapsulated by Sidney Pollard, who sees Italy as a mere supplier of raw materials for France.1 The increasing disenchantment of enlightened and radical Italians with the dictatorial nature of Napoleonic rule after the high hopes of the revolutionary years, 1796 – 9 – the triennio – has spawned a rich scholarly literature.2 The imposition of mass conscription aroused the popular resentment found throughout Napoleonic Europe.3 Such tensions represent the predictable burden of imperial domination, especially in time of war. They are common themes in European history, the natural outcome of one state subjugating its neighbour. However, both private and official sources reveal other, more complex, pressures at work on the French, pressures which turned the relationship between conquered Italy and imperial France into an exercise in cultural imperialism that went beyond material exploitation. Victor Kiernan has remarked that ‘French imperialism even in its earlier career inside Europe had two aspects, the arrogance as well as the enlightenment of the Great Nation’.4 Much of what follows proves him right.

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The cultural prejudices of the French occupiers matter because of the sheer power they wielded. Alongside the two ‘satellite kingdoms’ of Naples and Italy, where there was still a sizeable French presence at the apex of the state, the former continental territories of the House of Savoy (1802),5 the Republic of Genoa, the Duchies of Parma and Piacenza (1805), the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (1809) and the Papal States (1810),6 all became French departments between 1802 and 1810. They were ruled directly from Paris, and almost always with French officials in the most senior positions. These de´partements re´unis, as they were known, felt the full brunt of French rule, and the French in turn felt the full brunt of ruling them. Close contact between the imperial rulers and the ruled may not have begun as an exercise in confronting the ‘other’ by the intruding power, but it evolved into exactly that.7 This was not just a question of the new imperium attempting to impose its authority on the masses in order to control them, although that was indeed attempted in Napoleonic Italy. Rather, the most perverse aspect of French imperial rule in Italy was, arguably, the disdain the French felt for the culture of the elites they were meant to appease and integrate – ‘amalgamate’ and ‘rally’ in official parlance8 – into the imperial regime. Both these policies were direct responses by the Consular regime of 1799–1804 to the political divisions inherited from the Revolution. By standing above faction, the new government hoped to ‘rally’ all sections of opinion to it. In the context of the French interior, this stemmed from the need to calm a fiercely contested civil war and to confront the political realities of a society that was evenly divided. Transplanted to Italy, however, the French soon had to face the fact that their true supporters were thin on the ground. The events of the initial French occupation of Italy in 1796–9 showed the future imperialists just how isolated and embattled the Italian Jacobins were. When they returned in 1800, and as their rule expanded in the years thereafter, the French were forced to try to embrace and deal in a non-partisan way with exactly those local elites which had opposed them in the 1790s.The crucial difference with France was that the imperial regime in Italy had no secure base of support on which to build. Nevertheless, as will emerge, many more Italians were prepared to rally to the regime than the French were ready to accept as collaborators. ‘Amalgamation’ was the twin of ‘rallying’. It entailed more than loyalty to the regime, but an ability, also, to work according to its

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precepts, to accept without nuance or concession the administrative structures of the state and the social construct embodied in the Civil Code. These pillars of the new empire had evolved within French society in response to its needs, and so proved largely apolitical innovations in the imperial heartland.9 To ‘integrate’ naturally with the Code and the administrative structures based on prefects and departments – in the sense, as defined by Nathan Wachtel, of uncoerced acceptance of new phenomena10 – was to become amalgamated into the regime itself. This was the case within France, in that these institutions remained intact after the fall of the Napoleonic regime in 1814– 15. However, in Italy amalgamation posed two quite different problems, for ruled and for rulers. For some Italians these structures, so central to the empire, proved impossible to accept, which is hardly surprising in any imperial relationship. However, all too often the French felt the Italians incapable of amalgamating successfully into their system. This applied not only to those who refused collaboration, but also to many who had ‘rallied’. ‘Amalgamation’ was a holistic process for the French. No exceptions or modifications to the Code or to the administrative institutions of the empire were ever contemplated by the new rulers. It was up to Italians to amalgamate themselves into a rigidly set imperial template. This was the whole basis of the imperial relationship for the French, from beginning to end. They started from a belief that ‘rallying’ and ‘amalgamation’ were succeeding in France, that the Code and the administrative system evolved in France since 1789 were universally applicable because they were based on enlightened ‘first principles’. Italians found it relatively easier to ‘rally’ to a regime that offered better policing, together with fairer and more rational taxation.11 There was much in the emergent ‘security state’ that appealed to them. Melzi, Napoleon’s chief collaborator in the Italian Republic at the start of the period, thought the real problem lay in convincing the propertied classes of the solidity of imperial rule, not of its acceptability.12 Amalgamation proved harder, for it turned on French acceptance of the capacity of Italians to transform themselves into Frenchmen. The imperial officials were there to foster this, but it was not a task they found to their taste. The sustained relationships between ruler and ruled in Napoleonic Italy produced an attitude among the French breathtaking in its hostility to the native culture, and startling in its uniformity. A recent

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collection of essays has drawn attention to the manner in which Italian intellectuals and politicians ‘orientalised’ the Mezzogiorno (the south) after unification in the mid nineteenth century, seeing it as a region apart, unable to integrate – to amalgamate, in an earlier discourse – into the more advanced society of the north.13 The French took a strikingly similar view of many of those very parts of Italy which were later regarded as being in the vanguard of modernisation: the former states of the north-west, which became the bulk of the de´partements re´unis literally, the ‘reunited departments’ – usually called the ‘imperial departments’. What began as the rule of one neighbouring society over another developed quite rapidly into a readily acknowledged, if often subtle, confrontation between an imperial power and its new subjects. Here, it is a question of rejection by the French that goes far beyond their insistence that Italians in their service conformed to their norms.14 French rule in Italy offers a concrete example of the cultural arrogance charted by Stuart Woolf in more general terms,15 but the impetus to supplant Italian culture with their own stemmed from their own experiences, as much as from official policy. When coupled with a policy of inclusion, it became untenable.16 ***** The French did not occupy Italy with the ready assumption that they were dealing with ‘the other’, as they had in Egypt in 1798 – 1800,17 but two things had happened in the course of the revolutionary decade which overshadowed the long history of contact between France and the Italian states. The first was the massive, truly pan-Italian series of revolts against the French and their indigenous collaborators, the ‘Italian Jacobins’, which accompanied the Austro-Russian military victories of 1799, and ended the fledgling republics of the triennio.18 On one level, the violence and force of these risings disabused future French administrators of any illusions they may have had that their rule would be accepted naturally, or without significant distaste, among the masses and ruling elites alike. However, the French proved able to assimilate this into their internal experience of counterrevolution in the Vende´e, a comparison frequently invoked in the course of suppressing banditry and enforcing conscription. By 1806,

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there was little doubt that law and order could be restored and imperial rule maintained. The other aspect of the relationship between France and Italy that had changed as a result of the Revolution was more subjective. The French ruling elite emerged from the 1790s – and even more, from the series of Napoleonic victories before 1807 – with a belief that France was indeed la Grande Nation, to be imitated and obeyed by the rest of Europe. It was a belief that had strained the relationship between the French and the foreign patriots well before 1799. The French proved arrogant and inflexible in their dealings with those who, unlike them, had failed to ‘liberate themselves’.19 This is the key to grasping why the relationship between imperial France and its Italian provinces took so little account of the long history of contact between the cultures, and why close historic neighbours failed to integrate at any appreciable level. The French defined their whole history and culture in terms of the success of the Revolution in regenerating them, and in their subsequent mastering of the Revolution. Following a concept of history embedded in Enlightenment thought, France was now the ‘torch-bearer’ of Western civilisation, a torch once carried long ago by Rome. Even the debt to Rome was questioned under Napoleon, through the growing official interest in the Celtic origins of a civilisation increasingly regarded as ‘purely’ French.20 French pronouncements on the position of Italy in the empire are unambiguous in defining theirs as the imperial power: as in the official rationale for the annexation of the Papal States, in the decree of 30 December 1809, ‘to assure the Roman departments an administration that will regenerate them’.21 A report to Napoleon by the Minister of Justice in 1811 left no doubt about the desirability of French domination of Italy: Almost all the institutions of Europe were created by the conquerors . . . Men would never have escaped barbarism, had they continued to live in small, isolated settlements: they would have remained sunk in anarchy and brutishness. Such has always been the fate of peoples who were not held in check by a superior force; such was the lot of the Gauls when they were conquered by the Romans, such was the lot of the peoples of Italy until only recently, before their reunion with France . . . Only great empires

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provide the encouragement and rewards for talent that make for progress. Empire fosters the spread of law and, of necessity, perfects it through bringing together so many diverse states . . . The first rays of gentility shone on Europe through the exploits of Charlemagne.22 The French recognised a debt to Italy, but one rooted so far in the past that Charlemagne had initiated its repayment. A terse comment by the Minister of Religious Affairs (cultes) on the need for a French bishop at the head of the newly organised Piedmontese dioceses puts the nature of French imperialism into stark relief, long before the quarrel between Napoleon and Pius VII embittered Church– state relations: ‘I am aware of the importance of placing a French bishop in the former Piedmontese states, to Gallicanize their clergy.’23 If the relationship between France and Italy was ancient, its present character was clearly based on emphatic French superiority. By the advent of Napoleon, the French saw little of worth in the Italian past between the Romans and the efforts of the eighteenth-century reformers. With a few isolated exceptions like Carlo Borromeo,24 the French had little time even for the Italian Renaissance – save for its plastic arts, as in Rome.25 In Florence, they were more interested in new, practical projects than in the restoration of Renaissance buildings.26 Only the classical past really inspired them, thus making Canova the most successful point of contact between French and Italian high culture under Napoleon.27 The historical relationship between France and Italy cannot be described as alien, but the French did not conceive of it being in any way equal, even in the past. In his Me´moire pour servir a` l’histoire de la socie´te´ polie en France, written after his own experiences as a senior imperial administrator in Naples, and those of his son in Umbria, Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of the leading proto-anthropologists of the period, portrays Italian influence on France during the age of Louis XIV as wholly corrupting and retrograde.28 The most scandal-ridden aristocratic hoˆtels of the late seventeenth century were ‘the debris of that Italian school of morality founded by the family of Cardinal Mazarin’.29 To this, he opposed the intelligent, civilised character of native conversation, ‘that social instinct which seems to belong to the French, more than to any other nation’, ‘that French pleasure which is the envy of all other

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civilized nations, conversation’.30 His prejudices reflect those previously at work in Napoleonic Italy. When the French derided the lack of salons in Italian elite society, it was a very real, profound condemnation. ***** In confronting the cultural foundations of Italian society, the French sharpened their own sense of cultural superiority, and defined themselves against an Italian ‘other’, even at the most elemental levels. In their bedraggled state, in the first Italian campaign of 1796, the Army of Italy may have been content with Napoleon’s description of the north Italian plains as a land of milk and honey, but the educated, sensitive administrators who arrived later were more complex, and less easily satisfied by what they found. Men reared in the Enlightenment, they attached a strong importance to the environment. The French contrasted the natural beauties of Italy with its perceived human geography. From their very first experiences in Piedmont, French administrators such as Jourde, the Auvergnat magistrate charged with the introduction of the French judicial system there in 1801–3, were struck by the sharp contrast between the natural beauty of Italy and the need to take its inhabitants in the firm, French imperial hand: ‘The French are needed for criminal cases most of all . . . because of the personal animosities that exist among the people of this beautiful country.’31 Such reactions became the norm everywhere in the years that followed as the empire expanded south. In common with all those reared on the classics, before and since, educated French officials showed a deep knowledge of the history of the landscape around them. On a visit to the Apennines north of Rome, Tournon, the French Prefect of Rome, described the panorama before him entirely through classical affinities. The spectre of decline it contained haunted him: It is one of those sights that touches the soul more than the eyes. Spread out beneath one’s feet is a country that was for so long the master of all the others . . . and yet now, its ruins are everywhere!! The soul is crushed by the weight of the idea. It is the same earth, the same sky; only man has changed! It is a long way from the temple of Jupiter, which dominated the Eternal City, to the

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humble hospice of the Passionists! Where conquerors bore home their exotic spoils there, now beggars offer alms to wretches even poorer than themselves, the Mendicant friars! – The flora is admirable, and very like that in the beautiful valleys of the Auvergne.32 Here is encapsulated the relationship between imperial France and subject Italy: an admiration for a long-dead imperial past, imbued with an empathy that only intensified a deep contempt for the contemporary Catholic, Baroque culture that cluttered the nobility of the classical past and the natural beauty of the present. Only the flora was up to the French mark. Tournon was at least familiar with the classical landscape, perceived with passion and empathy in the manner of educated Westerners. He found only strangeness in his contemporary surroundings, however, as in his clear contempt for the inferiority of modern Roman gardens: ‘They know nothing of our sculpted trees, nor our lovely shrubbery; the arrival of spring is barely reflected by the foliage.’33 Indeed, Tournon seems a man afloat in a very alien physical world when it is shorn of its classical ruins: This landscape has nothing to do with ours. Indian fig trees and aloes cover the craggy hillsides, and from their summits, you can see the immense, marshy plains, the sea . . . and the crests of the Apennines, covered in snow.34 This was manifestly more than homesickness for the Rhoˆne. It was a profound sense of ‘otherness’. Adrift, and often assailed, the French drew from Italy only its remote past; but these remarks by Tournon denote something far more personal. Even a classical education could not prepare him for the genuine physical dislocation he felt in central Italy. Norvins-Montbreton, the director-general of police in Rome, and later one of Napoleon’s first hagiographers, undertook a six-week tour of his two departments on horseback, and constantly juxtaposed the natural beauty of the mountains with towns like Alatri, whose dirty, badly paved streets were ‘in harmony with its inhabitants’.35 ‘Its inhabitants . . . behave like Africans’, he concluded – a profound

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condemnation that embraced the elites as well as the lower classes.36 He felt himself more than abroad, amid an environment that was not European, as he understood it. The wild peripheries of the old states were a perennial presence in Italy, however. The rot began at the centre. ***** It was not only, nor most urgently, the periphery that worried the French, but the urban elites at the old centres of government. On the periphery, the French could and did draw heavily on a recent tradition of Enlightenment ethnography, to analyse and try to govern the ‘unpoliced’ and so ‘impolite’ communities which they perceived in the Italian hinterlands.37 Their attitude to the society of the Italian cities and lowlands, as it evolved, came to resemble Edward Said’s concept of ‘orientalism’, in so far as the French regarded these parts of Italy as in no way primitive. Indeed, some regarded them as too sophisticated for their own good. As with Western views of the Ottoman Middle East, in Said’s formulation, so the administrators of imperial Italy viewed urban and elite culture as old centres of civilisation in decline. They saw the impediment to amalgamation, if not necessarily to a rallying of the urban elites, as the atrophied, stagnant condition of their culture. As a result, their political cultures had become ‘trivialised’. This was certainly how the French regarded the states of ancien re´gime Italy. However controversial Said’s thesis may be in its original application – and it is beyond the competence of this chapter to judge the matter – it would seem to have a ready application to French attitudes in the urban centres of Napoleonic Italy.38 The need for firm imperial rule stemmed not only from the intrinsically ‘degraded’ aspects of elite culture, but also, paradoxically, from the inherently ‘good’ qualities in the Italian upper classes that had been perverted under the ancien re´gime. Antoine Roederer, son of PierreLouis and the Prefect of Spoleto, remarked of the Umbrian elites: We find ourselves in a country where the upper class is very clever. They take the slightest hint. If the commander hesitates in the least he will be disarmed and left powerless; it was always thus, for he who is firm and just is the absolute master of this country.39

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His colleague further north, in the department of the Apennines, agreed, awarding grudging praise to the Ligurian elites: We have to cope with the kind of men who are as used to calculating the danger as much as the reward, and who act only in proportion to the interest or the risk that must be run.40 Lagarde, the French director-general of police in Florence, developed a comparable view of the Tuscans, to whom he paid the backhanded compliment that ‘the Tuscans are more used to careful calculation, than to being noble or courageous enough to speak the truth’;41 ‘The Tuscan is neither ardent nor easily flattered’.42 Lagarde extended this judgement beyond his own departments: ‘It is scarcely known, in Italy, to take an important decision, without a little reticence or a secret, second thought’.43 The last observation is among the most important, for the French found the Italian urban elites as hard to penetrate as the wilds of the periphery. ***** The remarkably uniform condemnation of Italy by the French was learnt, not ingrained, for they did not initially conceive of Italy or the Italians as a monolith. There were two particular parts of the peninsula the French had great hopes of, prior to annexing them: Piedmont and Tuscany. These states, in their different ways, were seen as exceptions to the pervasiveness of weak government elsewhere, and it is no coincidence that Napoleon created localised courts in Turin (under his sister Pauline and her husband, Carlo Borghese, in 1807) and in Florence (under his other sister, Elisa, in 1810). Both courts represented concerted efforts to rally their elites, a clear signal that the regime saw them as special in a way it did not regard the Ligurians or the Parmensi. In the Piedmontese, the Napoleonic regime sought kindred absolutists; in the Tuscans, fellow bien-pensants. In both cases, however, it was disappointed not just by unresponsiveness to French entreaties, but by the Piedmontese and Tuscans themselves. There were several prominent cases of assimilation in the higher ranks of the Piedmontese magistracy, notably Peyretti di Condove, the president of Turin’s Court of Appeal, and Ugo Botton di

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Castellamento, who went on to serve on the Cour de Cassation in Paris, and remained there after 1814.44 The most famous was Napoleon’s personal librarian, Carlo Denina, who exhorted his compatriots to become wholly francophone in his highly critical Tableau historique, statisitique et moral de la Haute Italie (1805). Set beside this, however, was the reluctant, defensive ‘rallying’ of the Balbos; the decided, if discreet, cultural resistance of the Concordi;45 and – perhaps the most disappointing for the French – the realisation of how shallow the pool of talent actually was. There were very few Piedmontese the French judiciary thought capable of assimilation. French public prosecutors were kept deliberately as ‘watchdogs’ on the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Courts of the Piedmontese departments throughout the period.46 Indeed, although it remained official policy to employ Piedmontese elsewhere in Italy – a recognition from Paris of their assimilation – French officials in direct contact with them often despaired of them. Antoine Roederer rejoiced at the departure of his Piedmontese secretary, with his incomprehensible French, and the arrival of Dubois from the department of the Orne, ‘a man shaped by experience’.47 The Piedmontese were very prominent in the higher courts of the newly annexed Roman departments, an official policy made clear by Dal Pozzo, the Piedmontese magistrate charged with their initial organisation: The reason there are so many Piedmontese is that Piedmont is the country . . . longest reunited [to France] . . . and if I have any regrets about their appointment . . . it is for having stripped the Piedmontese courts of their best men.48 The Minister of Justice, however, loathed this policy, telling the Emperor: Sire, I will dare to tell you honestly, I wish they had been drawn from old France, where many magistrates and jurisconsuls can be found, who have a good knowledge of Italian, as well as all the qualities needed in a good magistrate.49 Few more emphatic statements can be found, and this was made at the highest level.

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The French showed interest in Tuscany long before annexation. In a report to Paris as early as 1802, the rule of Peter-Leopold was extolled, and all the current problems attributed to his replacement by the reactionary regime of Ferdinand III. A return to reform would, Paris was told, find favour among the Tuscans, ‘and all the present troubles stem from the policies which a weak, misled prince substituted for the great ideas of a philosopher king’.50 Degerando, a senior imperial administrator, shared this optimism during the early stages of annexation.51 On closer acquaintance, however, they perceived a society largely unchanged since the middle ages. The Prefect of Ombronne, the imperial department virtually synonymous with the old state of Siena, thought Tuscan problems had much deeper roots than the revolutionary upheavals of the previous decades: To find the cause of the moral depravity of the Tuscans, you have to go back to the distant past, as Boccaccio in his tales and the historians who have written after him have given us images that are, assuredly, unflattering.52 It was soon found that the pro-Leopoldin clergy, who had shaped the reforms of the Synod of Pistoia in 1787,53 were now old, and the younger generation was deeply reactionary in outlook.54 Indeed, far from seeing themselves as the vanguard of a popular pro-Leopoldine reform movement, Tuscan Jacobins felt themselves isolated and threatened to a degree that even the French police often refused to believe: they would feel vulnerable, were we to evacuate [Tuscany] as happened in the past (1799), they are afraid for their circumstances, they exaggerate the supposed dangers because they feel so far away, and they see a long-standing conspiracy of hatred against them in what is really only a surliness born of enforced obedience to necessary, if disagreeable, policies.55 The French were particularly disappointed with the Tuscans. They had known an almost ‘model’ enlightened ruler in Peter-Leopold, and, like most foreigners in most eras, they associated what was best in Italy with the cradle of its modern high culture – until they got there.

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In their individual areas, the French did not often think that they were experiencing part of a wider phenomenon, however. Those charged with the administration of the former Papal States, above all, insisted constantly on the singular, bizarre nature of the society and polity they had to dismantle. Degerando, one of the imperial civil servants charged with the organisation of the new Roman departments, believed initially that the complete lack of normal political traditions in the Papal States offered the best hope for their assimilation: They are more disposed to become French, than any of the other peoples of the peninsula: never having had a country of their own, always having had to obey foreigners . . . they do what they are bid, without being coerced.56 Towards the close of French rule, the director-general of police in Rome still stressed that Rome was unique, but unique in its particular hopelessness: Rome has never acted as a sovereign state in its dealings with Europe. Its government was neither commercial nor warlike in character. It depended on the credulity of Catholics, on the spiritual influence of the great Saint, and so it could not make common cause with other governments, who all had age-old interests based on family ties, fleets, armies, and on tangible territorial power . . . Thus there was no reason to have a series of political interests in common with France; there was nothing this singular people could have accepted or understood of such common interests, for it does not possess the most basic makings of a nation; it is under the yoke of its priests and its lawyers, who have replaced the victors of the Capitol as its rulers.57 Yet Norvins-Montbreton’s views were echoed elsewhere. Lagarde concluded of the Tuscans, in whom so much early hope resided, that: They are too blind, too ignorant, to appreciate the immense resources that a genius such as the emperor – who is resolved to crush the enemies of civilization – can create and nurture.58

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Nor was the assessment of Nardon in Parma much different: ‘As for the administration . . . as for its employees, I would like to seize this chance to rid myself of such a crowd of incompetent spendthrifts; I don’t know what to do with them.’59 Thus, the differences among Italian regions became as nothing when set beside those between all Italians and their French rulers. The closer the French got to elite Italian culture, the deeper these differences appeared to be, everywhere. ***** The French either erected social and cultural barriers between Italians and themselves, or refused to cross those they found. Some were of the most intimate kind. The gendarmerie of the Italian departments was always maintained at a ratio of two-thirds French to one-third native within its six-man brigades, and intermarriage in the communities they served was specifically forbidden. When superior officers intervened to prevent such unions, it was often with genuine contempt for the locals, as in this outburst by a commandant in Piedmont: It is important to prevent such abuses occurring if we do not want to witness gendarmes marrying everything Piedmont has to offer in the way of the worst and most distasteful kind of subject.60 There appear to have been some marriages, although they may have taken place in church only and without a legally binding civil marriage, thus escaping the records, and so the attention, of the higher authorities.61 Humanity ‘had out’ in such cases, but policy was to prevent it. Although it was harder to prevent liaisons, often of a turbulent nature, between errant French administrators and local women, the official attitude was the same. Paris showed predictable concern that the French public prosecutor of Sarazzana, involved with a local woman, had ‘gone native’ and got involved in a vendetta concerning her family, a case which only confirmed the worst French prejudices.62 This was not a disengaged policy respected only in Paris. Tournon, as a single man, had entre´e into Roman high society, but he drew the line at marriage, as he told his mother in no uncertain terms:

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I want a wife of at least twenty. Any younger, and she would be too prone to adopt the mores of this country, which, in all Europe, are those most set against personal happiness. I swear that, although I am not really jealous by nature, I would only marry in Rome with considerable distaste. ‘Putting it about’ [Le ‘divergondage’ ] – for that is the term for it – is so general, so open among the higher nobility, that I should almost never want my wife to live alone among these society women.63 Tournon’s stern opinion of the cream of Roman womanhood and high society echoes the views of Roederer senior on the Medici in Paris. It is all the more shocking, because Tournon actually found much pleasure in the company of upper-class Roman women: One hears voices here so beautiful, that Paris could never even imagine them. This beautiful language is worthy of the sirens! . . . The Romans execute the greatest musical problems with inexpressible charm. Their singing is full of expression, and seems to be part of that voluptuous abandon that is a mark of their manners.64 This ‘voluptuous abandon’ always ensured that they remained merely ‘my supposed amours’; Tournon married a French girl in her twenties, whom he brought to Rome in 1811 and kept firmly away from Roman society. His views were reflected in official parlance, in the 1810 ‘Rapport statistique sur Rome et les E´tats Romains’ drawn up for the Minister of the Interior by Degerando. In it, he told the policy makers in Paris: High society women are very corrupt, but without the slightest hint of coquettishness about them. This corruption is a very deeply rooted thing, it is accepted, and does not stop them being devout.65 Lagarde referred to Sandra Maria, the great Florentine beauty and ex-mistress of the British ambassador, Lord Wyndham, with the unconcealed contempt he extended to all Italian women: She conforms to the way of Italian women: she was a very rowdy amazon, when Wyndam wanted her to be. She then turned very

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docile under Reille, whose position did not allow uproar or commotion around him.66 Lagarde condemned Maria less for her behaviour than for her submissiveness, detecting in her the same artificial nature Tournon found in Roman debutantes. Above all, these men emerge as difficult to impress. Lagarde also lambasted the overtly double standards of the Florentine elite. Informing his superiors that the mayor, Fragoniani, not only made monthly payments to a foundlings’ hospital, but also had been caught openly in his carriage with a dancer, Lagarde did not hesitate to draw a wider conclusion: These details, which will scandalize Your Excellency somewhat, reveal the real state of affairs here better than a host of reports; and they will prove to you how little you can judge Italy by French standards.67 Tournon saw the attractions of Roman women and noble Roman sociabilitie´ as resting on the purely visual and sensual. As a conscious product of imperial French culture, he immediately recognised these attractions as shallow, inferior and unsatisfying to his own cultural and emotional needs. Yet Tournon’s attitude was relatively civil, for the general intensity of the dislike of Italian sexual mores and, fundamentally, of Italian women, borders on the fears of contamination by the ‘other’ noted by James Axtell in native–colonial relations in North America, rather than suggesting any ready European comparisons: The generalized European fear of barbarism that worried colonial planters and leaders was given specific shape and meaning by the Indian embodiment of the ‘heathenism’ that seemed so contagious to English frontiersmen.68 For ‘barbarism’, read ‘Italian womanhood’. This distaste had the immediate political consequence among the French of increasing their desire to replace indigenous culture with their own, and of cutting them off from significant social contact with the Italian urban elites. The marriage of d’Auzers, the French

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director-general of police in Turin, is not an exception to this rule. He married into the Cavours, a ‘pariah family’ among the old nobility for its close links to the Borghese court.69 Cultural imperialism created an acknowledged, semi-official apartheid that undermined the imperial policy of ‘amalgamation’ at its very base. ***** The French sought to replace the visual and musical with the written and spoken word throughout the de´partements re´unis. Nardon welcomed the establishment of two troupes of French actors in Parma and Piacenza, seeing in them a great aid for education and shaping public opinion: The theatres in Italy today are horrible, and serve only to propagate indecency, corrupt morality, encourage bad taste, and harbour notions of violent thoughts and crude passions . . . Spectacles . . . create great interest here; and so it is through them, that I want to cultivate the better qualities of the local inhabitants.70 This speaks volumes about the French self-perception of cultural superiority in such matters. Even the theatre was only a ‘half-way house’ on the road to the implantation of a more cerebral culture in French Italy, for ‘one goes to the spectacle here, as one would go to the salon in France’. Tournon, in Rome, lamented that ‘it hardly exists in this country, where the taste for reading is not widespread’.71 The French were quick to make the connection between the perceived Italian predilection for the visual arts and their approach to politics and religion. In effect, the French did not believe Italians made mature, rational distinctions between the sensual and the intellectual, between private taste and public life. NorvinsMontbreton condemned the Romans not only for their frivolity, but for their interpretation of piety as well: ‘these people, who prefer processions to dancing, and sermons to the theatre’.72 Indeed, he condemned the weakness of his colleagues, the Prefect and the Governor-General, for suspending the theatre during Lent, and got his way.73 Italians were despised in their gravitas, as much as they were in their amusements. This preference for the visual in all things had, effectively, shaped a whole religion and a whole political culture that transcended region or polity. Degerando said of ‘the Roman’:

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He is drawn to the visual – he is more interested in ceremony than in power; work is sacrificed for pleasantries; politeness and manners make more of an impression than deeds . . . The highest ranks of the prelacy were distinguished by the right to gild the bridles of their coach horses in the same way as did cardinals . . . a right which is the ambition of every man. Everything in Rome was driven by such important considerations.74 He extended this to the higher judiciary, where ‘business consists mainly in an exchange of courtesies’, and then to ‘their’ religion: Religion, as it is understood by enlightened men and felt by virtuous men, as it generally exists in France – that is, as the product of a reasoned and reasonable conviction, whose main aim is to improve morals – is scarcely even perceived to exist by the Romans . . . Religion which only expresses this, has little place among them. Relics, indulgences, the Forty Hours, the rosary, the little medals are what interest them; reading the scriptures would be a profanity, and whoever should discourse to a Roman of these august and simple truths, the existence of the author of all things, would be suspected of heresy, if not of atheism. The gospel no longer exists in Rome, unless it is depicted in the murals with which artists have decorated the basilicas . . . Many thousands of men who come to kiss the feet of the statue of Jupiter – now transformed into that of the Prince of the Apostles – scarcely even suspect that there might even be such a thing as the gospel . . .75 Degerando wielded considerable influence with Paris in such matters. He had served in the organisations of Genoa and Tuscany before Rome, where he had expressed similar views on the local culture. Above all, however, he was a member of the Institute and a leading ethnographer, author of the influential work Conside´rations sur les diverses me´thodes a` suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (1801). Carrying intellectual authority, as well as administrative experience, his assessment of the Italians he encountered drew more on his academic interest in ‘savage peoples’ than on his legislative work in France.76 When he remarked on how the Romans assumed they would be governed, it indicated how much was to be done:

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[They possess] great elegance, an easy grace. The Roman people is used to this; forms are what count for them . . . The Roman is satisfied with this, even if it is accompanied by an order. Manners lacking, however, is a deeply felt offence77 ***** However, even Degerando could not win the argument with Paris when he asserted – as did Junot in Parma, or Menou in Florence, earlier – that ‘What is called for is an eminent administrator, who arrives in splendour for the big occasions, and who has a long train of servants and of baggage.’78 In Parma, Nardon, the administrative Prefect who replaced Junot and introduced the French administrative system in its entirety, noted: Misery abounds everywhere in Parma . . . every audience is an appeal to my heart, and a complete emptying of my purse; can mothers dying of hunger be turned away? Moreau gave generously, so did Junot, and it has all collapsed on top of me. These people are the poor pensioners of the court . . . the whole population depends on it, directly or indirectly.79 Lagarde became deeply critical of Menou’s ‘policy of appeasement’ in the first phase of French rule in Tuscany, contrasting it with the unbending rigidity of Eugene’s adherence to French norms in the satellite Kingdom of Italy; in Florence he felt Menou had curried favour with the notables, at patriot expense, so ‘filling posts with those people who were most opposed to us’.80 His colleague in Genoa lamented that the municipality had not been purged of its aristocratic elements early in French rule, thus allowing a ‘party’ to entrench itself with a plan ‘aimed at turning Genoa against all new ideas . . . and showing the nobles that they . . . could reestablish aristocratic rule, and seize power again’.81 It was not a mistake repeated in Rome. The Papal States was the last region to be annexed, and the French had now learnt from earlier miscalculations. The appointment of Tournon as Prefect showed that Paris had determined to change Roman political culture, rather than compromise with it. Tournon declared on his arrival:

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A government based on precision and action is called for, utterly contrary to their customs, for until now, they have known an administration that works only on approximations. We do not take offence at working quickly . . . This single report will give you an idea of the amount of work needed to get these wheels – so numerous and, up to now, so badly coordinated – moving again.82 There is a striking similarity here to the vision of the oriental among Westerners, as construed by Said, just as the French vision of themselves corresponds to that, in Said’s formulation, adopted by Western imperialists. Working methods were not only different in terms of pace, but also in the relative value each culture placed on precision – that is, on truth itself.83 The only solution was the replacement of one system with another. Compromise was not an issue for the French. Tournon intended to set a personal example to the Romans directly in opposition to what he found, attacking the aesthetics which, he believed, embodied their political culture. He told his mother: My apartment . . . is very airy, and very tasteful, but also very simple. This is the only way to combat the magnificence of the Roman palaces, which are gilded, but lacking in all grace.84 Quite literally, clean air, simplicity and frugality were seen as the imperial virtues, to be laid before the Romans for admiration. The Romans were to be challenged at the very core of their culture by the institution of a deliberately contrasting way of life, as exemplified by their administrative chief. As Tournon told his father: I have begun opening up the house. My staff comprises a head maid, a chief butler, a cook, a valet, four lackeys and a coachman; the luxury in which these people live is so exaggerated, that I have had to augment their number more than I would have liked . . . It is absolutely essential to establish a system here that is utterly at odds with their customs, since it is founded on energy and precision.85 A new order was in evidence, down to the last domestic detail, for Tournon believed that this was what would most impress, and perplex, the Romans.

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Predictably, French officials saw education as the long-term salvation of the Italians from themselves, and as the surest foundation upon which their own rule would come to rest. Faced with the immediate challenge of ruling those so different from themselves, however, the new imperial regime decided, in the first instance, to lead by example. Tournon exemplifies this, but it went beyond personal conduct. Italians were to be shown the ways of ‘the other’ throughout the de´partements re´unis, in ways calculated to express the social as well as political differences and superiority of the imperial culture. Lagarde in Florence pointed to the gap in cultural habits, not only for Tuscany, but for the whole of northern Italy: The smallest towns have their theatres, the public meetings and their masques; but there are few private dances, and little resembling the socie´te´s, as we would call them, in the interior of France: It is not to their taste in Italy, where all classes like to mix together.86 If Nardon, in Parma, thought the opera buffa might provide a ‘half-way house’ to wean Italians away from the grosser aspects of their native opera and towards ‘proper’ theatre,87 Antoine Roederer and his wife took it upon themselves to do just this in the Umbrian prefecture of Spoleto. Everything was improvised, even slightly ridiculous, but Roederer felt cultural pride in this exercise in ‘amalgamation’: ‘It was all so pretty, and in the best possible taste imaginable’, he told his father.88 Taste and talent were what had to prevail. However limited Roederer’s provincial successes, they easily eclipsed the grandiose efforts of Elisa and Pauline Bonaparte. The failure of the Borghese court in Turin is well known; the core of the Piedmontese nobility did not follow the example of the higher magistrates and rally to the French. Instead, they withdrew to their own literary and social circles, where they indulged a passion for past military glories that had a distinct irony about it. Loyalty to the Savoyard dynasty was too powerful a force within the Piedmontese nobility for amalgamation to work. Yet the Piedmontese were at least familiar with this kind of loyalty – secular, centred on a monarch and a ruling house, translatable into military service – which the French felt to be alien to most other Italian nobilities.89 Elisa, by contrast, had willing participants at her court in

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the Pitti, but they soon turned away from serious engagement, partly because of the strict etiquette and moral standards she imposed – it was she who openly upbraided the mayor of Florence for his ‘carryings on’ in his carriage with the dancer – but also because Elisa had no influence in Paris, and so could not provide the patronage associated with a court. Lagarde concluded that the Florentine court ‘is hardly more than the opulent house of any rich individual’.90 Lagarde also detected deeper trends in Florence. Cultural differences made it hard for the French to meet the Florentine elite, thus compounding a natural political reticence on the part of the latter: In Italy the sense of ‘society’ and of the circle is barely in its infancy. The habit of going to the theatre every night is a barrier to it, and barely allows for even a snatched conversation, with no goal or point . . . It is every night, to the theatre; the rest of the time, one is inaccessible to everyone, unless one is in one’s lodge, or gives a brief audience on Saturday . . . The best people do not go to the cafe´.91 None of the great families, nor the archbishop, were in the habit of receiving people at home. He perceived that if anything of real importance was discussed in public, it was over billiards and gambling, which the Tuscans loved, but the French discouraged: ‘There are no socie´te´s, properly so called, because one would not find ten people in a group, in a house in Florence, in the evening.’92 This careful analysis of Florentine sociabilite´ betrays the inability of the French to mix on any terms but their own with people they were desperate to cultivate. Mingling was a ‘one-way street’, with the Florentines willing to attend the official court (which was more than happened in Turin), but unprepared to reciprocate. More significant, perhaps, was the unwillingness of the French officials to adopt local pastimes, and so enter Tuscan society. The French in Genoa were notorious for keeping to themselves93 and, as has been seen, the gendarmerie was virtually ordered to do so. Nor did literate Italians use the official post much. When it became essential to halt the flood of letters from Italian officers and soldiers after 1812,94 and to prepare against real conspiracies, it proved impossible. Even the noblest families, Lagarde admitted, used private networks of

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communication – coach drivers and those who travelled about with their work – whose existence the French, unlike the British in India, could only note.95 The French simply failed to penetrate Italy, and this failure was mostly of their own making. Not only did they perceive Italians of all and every class as ‘the other’, they set themselves up, consciously and determinedly, as an ‘other’, thus cutting themselves off from many normal points of contact. Their comparative failure in this respect appears all the more deliberate and total when the success of the British in India is set beside it. Indeed, C.A. Bayly concludes: We have . . . doubted that the positing of a radical “other” was the basic intellectual tool of colonial rule . . . British knowledge of Indians was not a self-sealed system. It arose as much from natural inquisitiveness and the desire to comprehend the world as it was, as from a simple act of domination96 The experience of Napoleonic Italy could not have been more different. ***** The point need not be laboured that the French were often mistaken in their perceptions of the Italian elites. In Piedmont and the Lombard parts of the Kingdom of Italy, at least, sound prefects and administrators were produced, who went on to preserve and refound Napoleonic institutions there after 1814. The much-maligned Dal Pozzo became a sage of Napoleonic legal lore. His meditations, much sought-after in legal circles, were published in transparent anonymity.97 In 1813 Lagarde thought most of the native Italian prefects weak and likely to desert their posts;98 he was proved wrong.99 Nevertheless, as all were only too well aware at the time, this ‘rallying’ embraced only a small proportion of the Italian elites. The Jacobins were too insignificant in numbers to run Italy, and were too unpopular to impose themselves. Paradoxically, the ill-conceived attempts to rally the more traditional elites had neutralised even this tenuous local support. Lagarde, in Florence, articulated it most clearly: ‘[The Jacobins] have burnt their boats for us; [the nobles] have kept theirs intact, to go over to whoever turns up with the intention of ruling them’.100 At the last, patriot loyalty was seen as compensation for their supposed inability to

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assimilate. Many French reactions to the working relationship they endured with the Italian patriots closely resemble European disdain for the South American liberals later in the century who were apparently unable to absorb European political culture.101 Embedded in Lagarde’s judgement was also an acknowledgement of the incongruity of the political cultures of post-revolutionary France and ancien re´gime Italy, as well as of that of Napoleonic ‘amalgamation’ in Italy. It was laced with arrogance, informed by a belief that Italians had no concept of national pride, but it also meant that all but a handful of Italians were ‘unusable’. Seen another way, it was a mark of the extent of French rigidity, that did not even allow the question to be posed ‘of how to distribute patronage, how much power to share with subjects in exchange for their cooperation’.102 Its practical corollary was the use of threats, and even force, to enlist the sons of prominent Italian families into military service in the elite guards of honour, and even as prestigious auditors to the Council of State, the ‘highest fliers’ in the Napoleonic bureaucracy.103 French arrogance was not confined to Italy. The contempt in which they held the Dutch and Spanish is well known.104 Stuart Woolf said of the French administrators in Illyria: ‘For them, the special status of the Illyrian provinces was . . . a measure of the problems of integrating so heterogeneous a territory into the French system.’105 Nor was French contempt for Italy born of ignorance or parochialism. All the higher French officials had a wide experience of western Europe. They were the best administrators thus equipped since the days of Charles V: Tournon and Norvins-Montbreton had served in Germany before coming to Rome; Menou, in Egypt before going to Turin and Florence; Lagarde had served inside France, and then in Milan, prior to Florence; Degerando and Roederer senior were true imperial administrators, with high-level experience in Naples and Germany; Beaumont-Brivazac came to his post in Genoa directly from Barcelona. Nevertheless, xenophobia and cultural arrogance dominate their attitudes, public and private. As the French took charge of Italy, they lost all interest in ethnography. Italian culture, once grasped, was not to be studied and recorded before it disappeared; it was simply to be made to disappear. The Prefectethnographers of the early Consulate had more interest in, and respect for, the peasant cultures of rural France, than many imperial officials had for the high Italian culture.106

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The severity of their judgements marks a clear perception of ‘the other’, of incompatibility, as well as of hostility, between opposing cultures. The European view of Latin America, as drawn by Kiernan, may even have part of its origins here: ‘From the distance of Europe all Latin America was much the same, and much oftener decadent than virile’.107 The French felt themselves a long way from Italy, especially when they were there, and it all looked alike to them. More subjectively, they seem already to have classed most of Italy among the decadent, unvirile nations, avant la lettre. Indeed, when direct comparisons are made with many extra-European imperial examples, it is the degree of French resistance to Italian culture that shocks, as opposed to the ability of other imperial regimes to tolerate, and even to ‘borrow’,108 from subject cultures more alien to them than that of early nineteenth-century Italy was to Napoleonic France. Compared to the British in India, they were unable, by their own admission, to penetrate Italian life, especially in those very regions – Piedmont and Tuscany – where their hopes had been highest. In Turin, the Prefect spoke continually of ‘this deaf resistance’ around him;109 in Florence, Lagarde asked aloud after four years there, ‘Are these people happy, behind their outward resignation and their genuine calm?’110 The French were able to gather a mass of statistics about many aspects of Italian life, but they could not penetrate further into the realities of Italian culture. Despite being aware of the need to work through local elites – as would become the norm in the later colonial empires, and, in India, even before the Mutiny111 – Napoleonic France never managed to do so in Italy. Its contempt for the indigenous elite culture was too ingrained to allow for real integration. Although applying the model of ‘orientalism’ to attitudes within Napoleonic Europe should be hedged with qualifications, the examination of French hostility towards their Italian administre´s can serve to warn historians against assuming too readily the historical reality of a single, unified European sense of cultural superiority over the rest of the world. Perhaps the last, damning word belongs to the wife of Antoine Roederer, the Prefect of Spoleto, who declared in a letter to her father-in-law while expecting her second child, ‘I swear to you that Spoleto is not where I want to have him, more than anything, I want my son to be utterly French.’112 This kind of imperialism came to be as unpopular among the rulers as among the ruled.

8 NOBLE ROMANS AND REGENERATED CITIZENS:THE MORALITY OF CONSCRIPTION IN NAPOLEONIC ITALY, 1800—14

I

n 1813 Napoleon raised four mounted regiments from the – hitherto – largely symbolic gardes d’honneur. The gardes were elite units, in a purely social sense, drawn from the wealthiest families of their respective departments who were, in theory at least, equipped at the expense of their families for ceremonial duties. His attempt to convert them into a fighting corps of 10,000 men in the last, desperate years of the empire represents more than an expedient means of reinforcing his military effectives cheaply, however: ‘It was a question of drawing the sons of the best families into the army, in the future interests of the dynasty’,1 an effort to involve those provincial elites who formed les masses de granit in the defence of the regime in its hour of deepest need.2 They fought with distinction in the campaign of 1814 in France,3 thus extending the concept of the army as l’e´cole de la nation to a section of the upper classes. When this policy was applied in the Italian departments of the empire, however, it assumed the magnitude of a campaign of moral regeneration that was itself the culmination of an arduous process of fostering a martial spirit in the hearts and minds of Italian males. For the French officials who imposed it, the creation of the gardes carried more than a hint of cultural imperialism. In April 1813, Antoine Roederer, the French Prefect of the department of Trasimeno,4 told his father5 that

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he had singled out a particular youth for the gardes. He was worth more than 100,000 francs in rents and carried ‘le plus beau nom d’Italie’, Connestabile Stoffa; but this was not Roederer’s reason for ‘targeting’ him for active service: His father is dead and his mother treats him like a little girl. She is a respectable woman who imagines she could not do better than to have three priests bring up her boy. This young man is eighteen. Judge for yourself what a blow this will be for the poor mother! It creates a great good chance for this young man. There have been attempts to exempt him under thousands of pretexts.6 Roederer had a duty to ensure that Connestabile Stoffa should ‘be all that he could be’, just as much as to the imperial regime, to ensure that no young notable was exempted ‘when it was a question of someone rich and important’.7 Roederer’s words are replete with ethnic stereotypes, both in their direct intent towards the unfortunate, inoffensive young Umbrian aristocrat, and in what they reveal about the ethos of imperial France. It is my present purpose to try to unravel the policies and underlying prejudices encapsulated in Roederer’s judgement on Connestabile Stoffa, to explore how and why la Grande Nation sought to ‘school’ Italians in the ways of war. ***** Poor young Stoffa was far from alone. His kind and class were but the last in a long line of inhabitants of Napoleonic Italy to feel the threat of military service in the imperial juggernaut. The military imperatives behind Napoleonic conscription have been well charted, as has the resistance it met with throughout Italy.8 Among the reasons most often cited for this almost universal hatred of conscription, among its students as well as among contemporaries, was its new, altogether foreign nature for the masses, and the disappearance of military service as a career among the nobility.9 Even the exceptional predilection of the Piedmontese nobility for military life has been questioned by some.10 However, the more subjective attempts to justify the conscription of millions of Italians – eventually drawn from all classes – remains relatively unexamined.

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Military service meant far more than seeing action, as Roederer’s words reveal, and it seems appropriate to explore the exportation of the concept of the army as l’e´cole de la nation beyond France. The French saw military service – be it voluntary or obligatory – as the cornerstone of collective and personal regeneration, as they made clear from the outset. By 1808, when several provinces of the Papal Marches were incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy, its viceroy, Eugene de Beauharnais, brusquely countered the widespread hope that conscription would not be extended to the ex-papal territories, because it did not accord with local traditions: To those who tell you that you need not obey the laws on conscription: How? As if this law was not the only means offered you to become a nation again, to make the power of Italy respected both now and in the future; to conserve the institutions that your Sovereign has given you! How? It is as if the law of conscription had been made for you alone; as if it was not, today, the fundamental law of every country in Europe; as if, finally, at the moment when it has been enforced in every nation, north and south, that three Italian departments could, without danger to themselves, try to exempt themselves from it!11 It was exactly because conscription was unknown in the ex-Papal States that it had to be introduced. Eugene stressed not only the inevitability of military service as part of the process of modernisation – and few more emphatic declarations of confidence in such a process can be found – but its desirability. French imperialists, whether in the Italian Kingdom or in the de´partements re´unis,12 echoed the viceroy’s assertion that the introduction of conscription was a cause for rejoicing, for it heralded the regeneration of a people, a discourse that culminated in the credo that the martial, essentially masculine virtues were the greatest pillars of an enlightened, modern polity. Military service was not just a public duty,13 but a whole process of ‘social engineering’. The term is crude, but wholly appropriate for a crude business: the deliberate intention of the French was the militarisation of an entire society, a social and cultural transformation of Italian life.14 *****

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The French were not unaware of the vast regional and cultural differences among their Italian administre´s, which makes their prescription of military service as a panacea for all of them even more remarkable, even if it was also an ingenious, cynical exercise in self-justification. The French had high hopes of the Piedmontese, believing that they were a singular example among Italians of martial traditions and their associated virtues. Napoleon and Menou, the military commandant of the region from 1802 to 1807, held the Piedmontese military aristocracy in the highest regard, but neither they nor the Borghese ‘court’ set up in Turin in 1807 could draw many of these families into the kind of collaboration they wanted from them. Indeed, the French presence only made the families draw closer together, retreating into the past. The period saw a flourishing of military histories of the Savoyard monarchy, all panegyrics to a glorious tradition now felt to be lost. Most remained on their estates in ‘splendid isolation’, such as Carlo Francesco Thaon di Revel,15 coerced into leaving Austrian service only by the harsh terms of the amnesty of 1800. Alessandro Saluzzo di Monsiglio, a general in the royal artillery – never the most aristocratic branch of the Piedmontese army – and the author of a stridently royalist military history of the eighteenth century, became not a general in the Grande Arme´e but the director of the lyce´e in Turin.16 He was as close as the French came to success. Only in Savoy, annexed to France since 1792, were there signs that a younger generation of the old military, aristocratic families were being drawn into French service, and then only latterly.17 By contrast, through the terms of the armistice of Cherasco of 1798 between France and Savoy, the French were able to absorb many of the best Piedmontese troops into their forces.18 The fighting spirit of the Piedmontese peasantry – so long the bane of invading French armies – was grudgingly but completely recognised in the French drive to bleed the region of men after the introduction of conscription, following annexation to France in 1802, ferocious local resistance notwithstanding.19 Their imperial rulers were determined to profit from the rude virtues of ‘this people called upon to defend the gates of Italy, always their arms to hand’, as they were described by the French General charged with giving them a gendarmerie.20 The militias of the upland border areas fought the French ferociously between 1792 and 1800, and in 1796 – after regular Austrian troops

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had withdrawn – these peasant formations, grouped around the semibandit barbetti, fought on alone.21 This was in stark contrast to the contempt the French showed for the minuscule forces of Parma, Tuscany, or the Papal States, whose officers were quickly replaced by Frenchmen, and whose units were dissolved and whose ranks were integrated into French units, disappearing without trace.22 French hopes for their other Italian subjects either resided in the remote, classical past – as in Tuscany, Umbria, and Rome – or did not exist at all, so great was their contempt for the Genoese or Parmensi. For the director-general of police in Florence: Nothing proves better the faults of former institutions and running of these various small states than the estrangement of the inhabitants of this part of the Empire from the profession of arms; they have inherited none of the inclinations of their earliest ancestors or the warlike peoples who have successively invaded this beautiful part of the Empire.23 His colleague in Rome was more hopeful, but hardly rooted in the present: Although the martial spirit is not at all alien to the inclinations of these people, they will never turn into warriors unless they are persuaded that serving is the quickest route to glory and honours . . . This taste for the military life is all the more remarkable among the Romans, because it never entered into the policies of the former government; it was never fostered through education.24 The French firmly believed that the disappearance of martial virtues, among the upper classes at least, was due to the weak government they associated with the small states of the Italian ancien re´gime. Roederer, in Umbria, saw the creation of the gardes d’honneur as a chance for aristocratic youth to find a useful public role for the first time in centuries: ‘as the former government offered the young neither military nor administrative careers, many of them, as a result, are unoccupied’.25 It was wrong for the aristocracy to be idle: its only useful role was in the service of the state, and the Umbrians needed this opportunity for their own good, more than the French actually needed them.

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In the nobility, weak government allowed cases such as the young Stoffa to abound, while on the periphery of these states – usually synonymous with the Apennine uplands – it fostered unchannelled aggression, ‘where their youth turns to brigandage, whereas long ago in France it had turned to soldiering’,26 according to the director-general of police. Embedded in these remarks are the enlightenment concepts that made possible the seemingly incongruous association between militarism and civilised life, so central to the ideology of Napoleonic imperialism. For Enlightenment thinkers such as De Pauw and Buffon, a socie´te´ polie could exist only within a socie´te´ police´e.27 Military service, far from brutalizing youth, would curb the latent effeminacy of its privileged members and the barbarism of its peasantry. ***** The French ‘on the ground’ quickly came to believe that undisciplined violence was better than the complete lack of aggression they detected in Connestabile Stoffa. The pervasive influence of baroque Catholicism and centuries of weak secular government – or its total absence, in the case of the Papal States – had led to the effective emasculation of the Italian male, save for the Piedmontese and those montagnardi so isolated from all civilisation as to constitute a separate problem. The French had no doubt either that Gallican Catholicism – as developed in France since the seventeenth century at least – was ‘the true religion’, of which the Italian Baroque was a ‘rough deviant’. The Minister of Religious Affairs (Cultes) remarked in 1809, ‘The Alps and the Pyrenees have always been barriers which the purity of the principles of the Gallican Church have not been able to cross.’28 French distaste for clerical influence on masculine culture is all the more interesting in the context of military service, because there was very little overt opposition among the clergy to the workings of conscription, however suspicious the French remained of their real attitudes. These elements of clerical influence on education were common to the entire peninsula, crossing lines of class, geographical region and political former demarcation. Indeed, they were practically the only common denominators shared by Italians, and the perceived impact on their character was what led the French to deliver such uniform judgements on so much variety and complexity.

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When the mother of the unfortunate young Stoffa gave in to her natural inclinations, there were three priests waiting and well able to prey on them. The French had no doubt that the clergy – and the kind of Catholicism they represented – were far too powerful an influence on Italian society, at least in urbanised areas and among the upper classes. It was bemoaned from Piedmont to the Papal States. The conduct of the Piedmontese clergy was in keeping with the perceived martial character of their flocks, as noted by Jourdan, the administrator-general of the region, in 1801: the clergy of Piedmont are pronounced enemies of the French government . . . As long as the French government continues to close its eyes to the criminal conduct of the priests . . . public tranquillity will always be threatened, the people of the countryside . . . will always be disposed to take up arms against us . . . the bulk of the country people has a blind confidence in their priests.29 In this, as in much else, Piedmont was seen as the exception that proves a wider rule. Further south, in the city of Parma in the valley of the Po, the French official charged with its administration in 1806 had very emphatic – and precise – views on the impact of clerical influence on Parmense youth: a morality which is inseparable from a pure and firm piety is rare here, and vices exist because of the absence of any check to moderate them . . . You would probably be surprised if I told you how familiar venomous, back-stabbing sarcasm is to the youth of all classes! You would probably be revolted to know that young creatures of eight or ten are sold into prostitution . . . the state must attack this propensity for licence at its source . . . The number of priests must be reduced.30 Such judgements singled out the Church as a source of active harm in Italy. There were plenty of aristocratic youths to go around the numerous priests of Parma, thanks to the presence in the town of one of the greatest, and most exclusive, boys’ boarding schools in Italy, the college

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of Santa Caterina, which had attracted the sons of noble families from all over Italy since the seventeenth century. A Jesuit foundation, the school had passed to the Oratorians on the dissolution of the former; the French inherited its boarders in 1805, when they annexed the Duchy. To reorient Parmense youth in particular, and the scions of the Italian nobility in general, the French soon reopened the college, but with a very different ethos and very clear goals. In the words of its French director: I can gather together 150 young men of the leading noble families of Italy, and I have got these little counts, marquesses and princes to enact Le dragon de Thionville and La bataille d’Austerlitz . . . You can grasp all the political and moral advantages. It is complained that I am giving too military an education to these children; that is to say, it is not exclusively monastical . . . I am breaking their ties to home a little, and their attachment to their families’ values. It gives a small taste of the right subjects that carry abroad the love of the laws and practices of my country.31 Parents withdrew their children by the score, and by 1807 the college collapsed, in what should have served as a warning of their utter distaste for the creation of the gardes d’honneur, six years later. As a statement of intent, however, there can be few more emphatic committed to paper. Here, the army was to become l’e´cole de la nation, just as in France, but the French firmly believed that there was much more schooling to be done, to the point where links with home and family had to be ‘broken’ – nothing less – and a wholly new culture instilled in the youth of the Italian nobility. That culture was entirely military in its ethos, and avowedly opposed to the values fostered by a Catholic education, in the eyes of those who shaped imperial policy. The administrative Prefect was very clear as to who was behind the collapse of the lyce´e, and his line of reasoning sheds great light on the extent to which the French saw the pillars of Italian culture as diametrically opposed to their own. He told his superiors that: The superb institution that is the College of St Catherine is slipping from my control: the holidays, the ignorance, the intrigue, the local rivalries, all combine to oppose my project . . . The ambassadors, the ministers, the references, the importuning of

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every conceivable type, the tears of some mothers, who have been misled – these are the tactics they use.32 A week later he added an old enemy to this list: Provoked by Jesuit lies, and by those of the teachers who have remained, in the spirit of a discredited system, those who cannot tolerate a few salutary changes in the college cannot abide an educated, hard-working Frenchman among them: the result is that, daily, parents withdraw their children . . . It seems impossible to struggle against the flood which is engulfing this fine establishment.33 These tirades provide a revealing list of those opposed to the French vision for a regenerated Italian youth, all the direct enemies of militarism: the strong tradition, in weak ancien re´gime states, of reliance on patronage – itself a breeding ground for selfish corruption – which places private concerns above public duties; the parochialism inherent in the life of weak polities; and – perhaps the greatest evidence for French imperialists of ineffectual government – the undue, indeed overweening, influence of the clergy, and of mothers, on the destinies of young men. In its emphasis ‘a` gagner les grandes familles’, the project for the Parmense lyce´e bears many of the more hackneyed marks of the standard caricature of a Napoleonic regime bent on aping the old order, and there is no doubting that it underlines the intense, all-pervasive militarism of the First Empire. Nevertheless, the comprehensive metamorphosis of the College of Santa Caterina indicates how profound was the gap between the imperial ethos and that of the Italian ancien re´gime, if not quite that of its French counterpart, which had produced the e´cole militaire. However, this approach was fast being overtaken by Se´gur’s project of the late 1780s, to ‘seek and find’ the true French officer class among the poorer provincial nobility: school environments could only hone deeper values instilled by family, cultural and even the physical environment.34 Set in this context, the enormity of the task of the French in Italy, outside Piedmont, becomes clearer: creating secondary military academies was a response to the realisation that there was no military ethos, indeed, no real sense of masculinity, to be found among the Italian aristocracy. Santa

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Caterina was a desperate short-cut in the process of ‘social engineering’, as becomes all too evident from the laboured analogy drawn by the administrative Prefect of Parma, as he tried to fit this project into prerevolutionary French traditions: ‘A central college of nobles in Italy . . . Thus, and in the same spirit, did Colbert present to Louis XIV the list of Distinguished Foreign Pensioners.’35 The ruthless, thorough exercise of militarised acculturation embodied in the curriculum of the lyce´e makes a nonsense of this comparison: Colbert’s pensioners were scholars and artists of some standing in their own countries.36 The roots of the ‘Santa Caterina project’ lay in a closer past. Buried at the bottom of all this is less the urge to return to the ways of the ancien re´gime than the adaptation of the fervent revolutionary belief in ‘regeneration’.37 Although the creation of the gardes d’honneur was spurred on by the desperate circumstances of post-1812, the creation of the lyce´e in Parma came at the height of imperial success, when there was no ‘real and present danger’ to be faced. By the experiment in Parma, it was hoped to skip a whole generation, allowing a wholly new cultural ethos to take root in the youth of the Italian aristocracies. To the administrative Prefect, loyalty to the regime appears as almost the means, rather than the end: It probably appears right to you to try to win over the great families; that if loyalty to the Emperor could scarcely exist in hearts in the sway of old habits and petty concerns, it will be born spontaneously in those of these young students.38 The director-general of police in Rome also held out hope for the younger generation of the Umbrian elites: ‘The Emperor will find officers easily among the aristocratic youth of this department, and among the rich families of the second rank, who try to emulate the nobility.’39 These sprigs of hope made the collapse of the gardes d’honneur all the more bitter a disillusionment. ***** While the clergy might emasculate the weak, largely through their mothers, if not in their own schools, there appeared many more upperclass youths – of higher spirits and bolder stamp – who escaped all

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control, there being no strong, militaristic state to act as a net to catch them as they fell into untrammelled delinquency. If poor Connestabile Stoffa had an alter ego, a Hyde to his priestridden Jekyll, it was probably Francesco Assereto, the son of a notary and municipal secretary in Uscio, a town in the Apennines above Genoa. Like his father, Francesco was judged a violent character by the local authorities. A confidential police report described his conduct thus: he picks quarrels, he disturbs the peace of families by bringing dishonour and shame among them, by ruining young, inexperienced girls. This young man, devoid of morality, takes pleasure in insulting the maire, the priest and the gendarmerie, who all want him exiled. His father is incapable of teaching him honest ways, as he is a bad character himself.40 Notaries were very influential people in provincial Italy, usually acting as municipal secretaries because they were among the few literate property owners in rural areas like the Ligurian Apennines, an area the Church had found hard to tame, and that the weak, almost ephemeral Republic of St George had never even tried to govern in any systematic way.41 Where a surfeit of Counter-Reformation in the urban lowlands had produced Connestabile Stoffa and his smothering mother, the lawless highlands spawned Francesco Assereto, who, although married, had chased his wife out for two younger girls. The cure was to be the same, allowing of course for the real, if not overwhelming, difference in social standing between Stoffa and Assereto. While the local authorities – the cure being the most vociferous among them, for obvious reasons – demanded his incorporation into a penal battalion in Corsica or Guyana, the higher echelons of the administration sent him instead to a line regiment as a second lieutenant, in the hopes that it would ‘channel his spirit’ to the good of society.42 The French authorities took a similar attitude to Luigi Torti, the unruly son of a landowner near Tortona, in north-western Italy. Whereas his family and the local authorities sought his arrest and imprisonment, the directorgeneral of police in Turin preferred to send him to the army, because ‘by this means, he can still become a good citizen’.43 Delinquency seemed to cut across region and class, in similar fashion to Baroque religion. It was in the opportunities for curbing this aspect of ancien re´gime ‘youth culture’ that French militarism found its most ready

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collaboration among Italian parents. Youthful urban troublemakers of all classes found their tormentors happy to borrow just enough French ideology to see them off to the depots. From every corner of Italy, requests of this kind reached the French. In 1813, at the height of the war, Lorenzo Carbone of Novi, in Liguria – ‘a man of some means and standing’ – asked the authorities to arrest his son Luca, ‘a young man more free-spirited than depraved’ in the opinion of the sub-Prefect,44 and to conscript him: a son whose propensity for the vices of gambling and drink have scandalized even his brothers; considering that he may well lead his younger brother astray, please send him to the service of the imperial armies, in the hope it may do him some good.45 Florence spawned similar petitions from distraught parents, among them Giovani Grassellini, who pleaded with the French, ‘exposing the irregular and libertine conduct of his son Paolo . . . that he be subjected to military discipline’ – this in December 1807, before Tuscany was even officially annexed to the empire.46 A flood of similar requests reached the new authorities at this precise moment – December 1807 – on the very eve of annexation, a clear and early indication of a real, if limited, source of common ground between rulers and ruled. Several reveal the limits of even this narrow common ground, however. The Pontenani, an aristocratic family of Arezzo, sought the conscription of a son as a means of dissolving his marriage to a girl ‘of low extraction’, and were rebuffed.47 The French had their own idea of what constituted a case for forcible conscription; it could include many forms of delinquency, from gambling to physical abuse of parents, right across the spectrum of behaviour to Connestabile Stoffa’s pampered piety, but it did not embrace many standard expectations of the local elites, for such requests seem to have been granted almost routinely before French rule.48 It is tempting to speculate that similar conduct on Stoffa’s part might have saved him from the gardes. All these ‘problem youths’, however varied their cases and social conditions may have been, represent but one aspect of ‘moral recruitment’. Those the new masters really wanted in their ranks were the cream of the upper classes. *****

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The French insisted on enrolling the ‘best and the brightest’ in the imperial cause, and when they decided on the need for ‘a change of scene’ for the flower of Italian youth, it was for reasons their families did not appreciate. In 1811 Roederer was frank with his own father about the resistance he met from the 12 leading families of Umbria, who were ordered to send two sons each to military schools in France: You can sense that this measure is as good for the families as it is necessary for the union of our countries, but you can scarcely imagine what its execution has provoked . . . Several times, force has had to used, to overcome the resistance provoked by their departures.49 Roederer was very proud of how he broke their resistance. He wrote ‘a very polite’ letter to all the fathers of these gilded conscripts, inviting them, together with their sons, to a dinner to discuss the matter. The letters were delivered by, and to be replied to via, the gendarmerie. That is, in only the most thinly disguised manner, Roederer subjected the leading families of his department to the same treatment meted out to any peasant family whose son turned re´fractaire: a visit from the feared military police, and an escort to the depot, even if in this case it was a handsome villa outside Spoleto. Roederer did nothing by chance: My invitation cards were understood perfectly; no one missed the dinner; I scarcely alluded to the departures, and only by way of conversation did I ask which day they were going, and if it was to be the same date as I’d promised the government . . . It only costs you a dinner.50 The zeal with which Roederer undermined the policy of ralliement among the fathers, to facilitate that of amalgame among the sons, is staggering. In a choice between the militarisation of Italian youth and an amicable accommodation of their parents, the French did not hesitate over which road to choose. The 24 Umbrian boys involved were not yet of conscription age: the e´coles militaires were for boys between 10 and 18; by 1813, 60 teenagers of the upper classes had been sent to the French military academies, a success for Roederer’s ‘hard

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line’ but a victory that, by his own admission, made the later task of recruiting the gardes d’honneur all but impossible, in terms of those still available, and in the bad feeling it created.51 The director-general of police in Rome told Paris frankly that it was not only conscription that ‘spread terror’ among the Romans, but the decrees ordering very young noblemen to the French military academies, thus affecting all classes of Roman society.52 The failure of the ‘Parma project’ led only to measures far harsher in character for the families involved – an exile even further afield. The loathing for this particular form of barely prepubescent conscription is usually glimpsed through the official records or from the private correspondence of the perpetrators, such as Roederer. The memoirs of Massimo d’Azeglio, however, afford an intimate and moving account of the experience of a leading Piedmontese noble family, when confronted by the removal of a son to the most prestigious French military academy, at St Cyr, and another to the imperial civil service: It was a bombshell for my father and the whole family. A man such as my father to feel wounded in the most hallowed of his rights, his authority as a father . . . the right to educate and direct his own children as he thought best, and to see two of them snatched away . . . by the enemy of his country . . . and to have no means of defence against him! It was enough to break his heart. I was not of an age to appreciate such things to the full, but well I remember the gloom that overshadowed the house for a time.53 D’Azeglio’s brother was allowed home after a year, thanks to his father’s influence and, pointedly, became a Jesuit priest shortly thereafter.54 Thus a warrior nobility was driven into the arms of the Jesuits. Massimo d’Azeglio later became a passionate leader of the Risorgimento, ironically, a powerful advocate of instilling martial spirit in those who ‘were to be made into Italians’, in his famous phrase. He did not extend this right to Napoleon, however, revealing that his own objections to the policy were rooted more in its offence to national independence and its tyrannical application than in its actual goals. The impact on many members of his circle was a more marked cultural reaction to Napoleonic militarism. His father entrusted the education of his sons to the

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influential Jesuit Guala, who was the director of the religious society, the Amicizie Cattolica, that came to dominate Piedmontese aristocratic circles in the last years of the empire, and under the Restoration.55 The damage done to the cause of elite ralliement need hardly be laboured in this case, but it is still worth noting that d’Azeglio’s unfortunate brother was nominated for St Cyr by the Prefect of Turin, Alexander Lameth,56 who had been appointed on Napoleon’s specific recommendation in 1809, to replace Pierre Loysel, a man with a Jacobin past, as part of a ‘very deliberate effort to recuperate a consensus among the milieus of the old nobility, which seemed integrated into the new imperial society, but were at heart nostalgic for the old order’.57 In this significant case, at least, Lameth failed, and he was bound to. The French meant business with the Italian upper classes. Eugene had actually pioneered the creation of a permanent regiment of gardes d’honneur in the Kingdom of Italy in 1806. Two years later, he had a cause ce´le`bre on his hands when three young gardes tried to desert. Their leader, Branoni, was of a ‘good family’ from the newly annexed ex-papal city of Ancona; another was from a Roman family of high standing. The military court, the conseil de guerre, ordered the standard penalty, death. Eugene did not hide from his stepfather the momentous import of this for the policy of ralliement, not only for the Kingdom but for the soon to be annexed Papal States: They brought together heaven and earth to make me suspend this judgement; I thought the example necessary to teach all our great nobles that they are equal before the law, to all other classes of society. In a week, they will talk no more of it.58 Eugene had carried out the execution the same morning he penned this to Napoleon. They were shot by their fellow gardes. These executions, at the very outset of Napoleonic rule in the exPapal Marches, and in the early stages of the formation of the gardes d’honneur, was a singular incident; but the uncompromising attitude taken by Eugene towards them – his determination to treat the scions of the elite in the same way as peasant rebels – should leave no doubts as to the purpose of Napoleonic policy in such matters, particularly when set beside the manner in which Roederer delivered his ‘dinner invitations’ in Umbria. It smacks more of St Just’s description of the Terror as a means

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to encourager les autres than of the conventional view of a parvenu regime bent on mollifying entrenched elites at the expense of republican principles. Above all, Italians were to learn the military virtues, including, where necessary, how to gun down their own. ***** The incongruity of the policy of ‘moral conscription’ in the wider context of that of ralliement finally emerged in the creation of the regiments of the gardes d’honneur, first in the Kingdom of Italy and then in the de´partements re´unis, when Napoleon chose to follow Eugene’s lead. A close look at the composition of Eugene’s gardes might have saved Napoleon’s prefects and police commissioners from the bitter, direct confrontations with those they were meant to be wooing. Eugene created two separate elite units, which together made up the royal guard of the Kingdom: the gardes d’honneur for the greatest families and the veliti for the sons of the middle classes. On paper, their numbers give an impression of a reasonable degree of acceptance for this kind of ralliement: by 1812, there were 541 gardes and 1,450 veliti.59 In fact, by 1810 most of both these corps were drawn from ‘the cream of the conscripts’.60 Some of those who had actually volunteered were not even subjects of the Kingdom, but Piedmontese, ‘[who] own property in the Kingdom, and [whose] relatives are civil servants’, hardly the basis of a new national military elite. Although Napoleon wanted to end this practice, Eugene disabused him of any hopes that the ranks could be filled otherwise.61 The veliti produced complaints from their families about the costs of equipping them and providing for their pensions: ‘There have already been occasions when pressure had to be applied, even to obtain payment of their allowances’, Eugene confessed.62 The lesson of the whole exercise in the Kingdom of Italy was in the unviable nature of such a corps in these milieux. Yet, the French persisted. By 1812–13, the attempts of Roederer, in Umbria, to form his contingent of gardes had degenerated into naked coercion of the kind he originally prided himself on avoiding. Early in 1812, he believed the use of force could be avoided, but only because his colleague in the neighbouring department of Rome, Tournon, had already set the tougher example, ‘which made it known to these families that it would

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be employed here, too, if necessary’.63 Roederer was put to the test several times, however. When one of the greatest Umbrian families, the Baglioni – ‘who are as historic a name in Italy as are the Montmorency in France’64 – sought exemption from the gardes, Roederer confided to his father that it would destroy his position if they succeeded. He exploded with a well-informed rage that almost unwittingly exposes the deep cultural fissures between the French and the Umbrian nobility. It displays the intensely symbolic importance the creation of the gardes had acquired for the Prefect of this unsteady department, the ultimate incongruity of imperial policy, and the ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ world its servants were really forced to inhabit: It is exactly from these families that hostages must be taken; this is just what the Emperor wanted to achieve, that much is clear, and I would be remiss in my duty, I would be a coward to exempt young Baglioni . . . I will take upon myself, the opprobrium for this action.65 Roederer did, indeed, assume the opprobrium for it all, for the Baglioni used their connections in Paris to exempt their son. The true importance of his remarks, however, lies in that they expose the policy of elite recruitment for what it had finally become. From a drive to regenerate the likes of Connestabile Stoffa, it had become part of a counterinsurgency offensive, a deeply ironic return to the policy of the Second Directory, during the bloody retreat of 1799, when hostages had been taken among Piedmontese royalists.66 Roederer forced Paris to agree to admit men of lower social standing to the gardes and he had high hopes of this: My aim was to attach the greatest number of families as possible to the present government, without, however, admitting young men to the garde who did not have any of the qualities necessary to participate in it honourably.67 Even these hopes were short-lived. A collective petition by the families of the ‘second rank’ accused Roederer of acting arbitrarily over the cost of equipping their sons. He replied that they simply were not paying for what they had ordered. Moreover:

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their complaints are born of . . . an important manoeuvre, stemming from a culpable opposition to the government . . . I have had to resort to force, the only means left to me, to recover the funds, having exhausted all attempts at persuasion . . .68 Whatever good relations may have existed between the French and this ‘second rank’ of notables in Umbria had now been shattered. Perhaps the most definitive example of the total miscarriage of the attempt to raise gardes d’honneur in Umbria is the fact that the only case of violent resistance to enrolment came from within the ranks of the local administration, itself. Bartocci, a notable of Folgino, was encouraged by his brother-in-law – the police commissioner of the town – first to write ‘an indecent letter’ to Roederer, in defiance of the order, and then to resist arrest by the gendarmerie sent to fetch him. Predictably, an example was made of him: It was not too tough, and it was necessary to halt an epidemic which was going to possess most of these families to protest in most unhelpful terms, against the selection of their children.69 To find such resistance within the ranks of families linked to the administration marked the nadir of ralliement. All Roederer’s problems were replicated in Tuscany. Here, too, things began bullishly. In 1809, four of the most prominent noble families of Arezzo – an area notable for its ferocious counter-revolutionary past70 – refused to send their sons to the gardes, an act of defiance all the more striking because there was no need for them to go on active service. At the time, it was their standing that worried the French, for ‘Each of these families enjoys a good reputation and the standing that comes with wealth’.71 Their fathers were all ordered to Paris, and when they were finally allowed home, they were kept under secret, but tight, surveillance to assess ‘the moral impact their return to Arezzo produces’.72 Whatever the immediate impact, it did little good when the true test came. By August 1812, when the order came to send the Tuscan gardes to the front, there were only 27 to be found, from a quota of 100. The director-general of police confessed that even they were not really supporters of the regime, as the gardes had been regarded as a social, rather than a military formation until now. One ray of hope, he added, was that the young men themselves were not complaining the loudest; the main objections came from their parents

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and mistresses.73 Florentine women were, indeed, upset by this. When the cohort was mobilised, in January, 1813, ‘a crowd of women and girls in tears followed it as far as the Porto San Gallo’,74 comportment all the more striking as these were women of the propertied classes. If the aristocratic youth of Tuscany were being won over, no one else was. It was all heightened by the refusal of the government to apply the normal rules of conscription to these units, thus not allowing the most important families to buy replacements for their ‘honoured’ sons, in contrast to the right accorded the poorest peasant. The Tuscan DirectorGeneral of police outlined the impact of this policy: ‘The gardes d’honneur . . . have upset the upper classes . . . the ve´lites affect all classes, indirectly, and so provoke an even more general feeling.’75 ***** It remains to be asked directly what the French actually sought of their Italian administre´s – what they actually wanted to turn them into, beyond putting them in uniform. Many of their prejudices and preferences emerge clearly enough: contempt for cosseted, lazy young nobles such as Connestabile Stoffa; a sneaking liking for tearaways like Francesco Assereto; a belief that it was better to get Italians of all classes out of Italy, not just to scotch desertion, but to remove them from the debilitating influences of faith, family and even climate. A strong streak of anticlericalism is always present, as is a contempt for the narrowness of Italian provincial life, even among the nobles. Yet these are negative elements in a set of policies driven by positive – indeed, protopositivist – imperatives. There is too much energy, determination, even fanatical faith in the righteousness of the French to base a definition of their martial virtue purely on what they disliked about Italian culture, although this sense of ‘otherness’ sharpened their prejudices. It would be wrong to seek an entirely logical, wholly coherent vision of military virtue among the French imperialists. Indeed, their ideal seems riddled with contradictions or, at least, apparent contradictions, which it was the particular genius of the ‘regenerated’ Grande Nation to hold in perfect balance: to be both poli, gai, an articulate adept of the salon and a great, even ruthless soldier; to be disciplined and police´, but imbued with a spirit of adventure and a sense of initiative, was the mark of l’homme re´ge´nere´ selon Napoleon.

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John Lynn76 and Alan Forrest77 have stressed the changes in French military ethos between the Republic and the empire, from that of a nation-in-arms, rooted in an egalitarian republicanism which saw military service as a civic duty, to a militarism based on more traditional codes of honour, deference and a sense of privilege among all ranks, as a caste apart from the nation as a whole. The challenge of militarizing Italian society drove the French to draw on elements of both. In some cases – like that of Roederer – it threw them back on their republican roots, for they were faced with the very different task of creating, rather than reviving and adapting, a military tradition. Only among the Piedmontese could they find the ethos of ‘an army of honour’, but here that very code worked against them. Elsewhere, they floundered in an alien culture, and it reinforced their sense that Napoleonic France was a vibrant blend of two traditions. The French believed that joining the Grande Nation would save the Italians from the campanilismo that even they admitted had thwarted their political development; the French extended this to the cultural sphere, and saw in the Italians’ attachment to home another manifestation of their emasculation. Roederer was particularly scathing about this trait in the Umbrian nobles he coerced into the military academies: I do not understand how a measure that would send families into raptures in Paris, so excellent in itself and in its results, can so assuredly shock these parents, especially the mothers, and even more in a country where the taste for travel is found only among the peasantry; I think the Roman must be the rarest foreigner in all the Courts of the whole world. They make their will before they leave Spoleto for Rome, and on the way, they want news of their relatives twenty times a day.78 That Roederer confided these views to his father emphasises not only that he held them strongly but that he contrasted this reluctance to quit hearth and home to advance a public career unfavourably with the course of his own life. Maladie du pays might have been an excusable affliction in a private soldier of the Grande Arme´e, but it was deplorable in its future officers, and they were to be disabused of it: leaving their mothers and the sight of their campanili was the imperative behind the exile of the aristocratic young to France, but beyond this lay the more positive

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THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

aspiration to broaden their horizons, to instil in them a vision of a wider imperial world that would, in turn, make them leave their pettiness of spirit – as well as their cosseted upbringings – well behind. When the French went looking for home-bred role models for their gilded conscripts, they drew them from a past that was imperial but rural, as well as safely remote. No mention is made of the Machiavellian models of the Renaissance or, indeed, of the heroism of the Lombard communes, so beloved of the neo-Guelphs of a later generation of nationalists. Their vision was too narrowly conceived, too petty, too ungenerous of spirit for the vision of Napoleonic Imperialists. Small was not beautiful, in the Napoleonic vision of the world. There was a constituency of educated Italians, the giacobini, that shared the essential tenets of Napoleonic militarism, and agreed with the assertion of Eugene’s proclamation to the people of the papal Marches that a nation could only come into being, and then hope to survive, if it militarised its soul and mobilised its men through the process of conscription. They have been much studied, their participation in the military institutions of the Kingdom of Italy in particular.79 The most articulate among them, and the most influential for future nationalists, was probably Ugo Foscolo, an ardent – if careful – opponent of the subordinate position of Italy to the French Empire, and a sworn – if secretive – opponent of Napoleonic absolutism.80 Yet, Foscolo believed firmly that Napoleonic imperialism should be supported in the short term, precisely because it gave to Italy the military traditions and structures it would need as an independent nation. It should be added that Foscolo said this from a safe desk job in the army of the Kingdom of Italy. When set in the wider context of the climate of elite opinion concerning the attempted militarisation of Italian society, as explored here, the views of Foscolo and other giacobini assume their proper place in the history of Napoleonic Italy: that of a distinct if highly articulate minority whose influence would weigh upon the future but scarcely affected the present. Even within the narrow spectrum of radical politics, faith in regeneration through militarism was far from universal: the work of Luciano Guerci on the radical thinkers of late eighteenth-century Lombardy reveals a notable absence of military themes among those proposed as means to a regeneration of Italian culture and society, public and private.81 The most realistic assessment of the hopes for the reception of the French ideal of a virile, warlike nation-in-arms among the Italian upper

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classes is probably to be found in the laconic understatement of Tournon, the urbane Prefect of Rome, writing to his more idealistic colleague, the Director-General of police: ‘To get the Romans used to conscription, you might consider favouring the use of replacements.’82 Disunited in so many other respects, peasants in the hinterlands, urban patricians – pious or libertine by inclination – and youths of every stamp and station, from Connestabile Stoffa to the most audacious bandit chiefs, were all puzzled and appalled by the philosophy at the heart of Napoleonic militarism. When set in the wider context of the literature of active, popular resistance to conscription, the almost universal detestation of this concept of a militarised society – as well as conscription per se – emerges in full, expanded to embrace the urban elites as well as the masses. This vision of the world was more than oppressive: it was alien. It is arguable that it was more than a lack of time to acculturate to conscription that prevented the development in Italy of the resigned obedience detected by Isser Woloch within France itself. In Italy, ironically, there are more signs of this among the masses of the lowlands and the great urban centres than among their betters.83 The assertion in a French context that ‘the regime placated wealthy families without permitting them a wholesale or definitive escape from the obligation of military service’84 simply did not hold good among the Italian elites. The acrimonious creation of the gardes d’honneur was the culmination of a process of alienation, or of the growing realisation of fundamental incompatibility between rulers and ruled. An incident in the city of Genoa in the last months of French rule, as reported by a local policeman to the maire, seems to speak for all but a handful of giacobini, so encapsulating Italian reaction to conscription. It deserves the last word: Je me fais un devoir de vous informer, comme l’affiche que vous avez publie´e . . . concernant les conscrits de l’an 1815, et qui e´tait placarde´e dans mon quartier . . . a e´te´ retrouve´ ce matin, pleine d’ordure, c’est-a`-dire (excusez le mot), de merde.85 (It is my duty to inform you that the notice you have published . . . concerning the conscripts for the year 1815 in my neighbourhood . . . has been found this morning, covered in stench, that is to say (excuse the term) in shit.)

NOTES

Introduction

Delineating an Imperial Region

1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 3 vols (Glasgow, 1972 [first published Paris, 1949]), vol. 1 2. J.L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997), p. 292, cited in Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, 2000), p. 289. 3. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 34. Adriano Prosperi, ‘“Otras Indias”: Missionari della Contro-riforma tra contadini e selvaggi’, in A. Prosperi (ed.), Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Florence, 1980 (Florence, 1982), pp. 205 –34. Idem, Tribubali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996), pp. 551 –601. 4. Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Philosophy of Praxis and Modern Culture’, in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, 2003), p. 391. 5. Gramsci, ‘Praxis’, Selections, p. 397. 6. Antonio Gramsci, ‘La religione come senso comune’, in T. La Rocca (ed.), Quaderni del Carcere (Milan, 1997), pp. 233–4. 7. Archives Nationales de Paris (hereafter ANP) F 7 8899 (Rome) Norvins to Min. PoliceGeneral 3 arrond., 7 September 1812. 8. Louis Gabriel Suchet, Me´moires du Mare´chal Suchet sur ses campagnes en Espagne, 2 vols (Paris, 1828), vol. 1, fn 1, pp. 285–7. 9. Gramsci, ‘History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria’, in Selections, p. 52. 10. Suchet, Me´moires, vol. 1, p. 294. 11. Charles J. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808– 1814 (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 29. 12. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 25. 13. Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville and London, 2006) is, perhaps, the most comprehensive treatment of this problem, amidst a vast and distinguished scholarly literature, in both English and French. 14. Michael Broers, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (London, 2014), pp. 15 –42.

NOTES TO PAGES 7 –13

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15. For an overview, Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773– 1821 (Lampeter, 1997), pp. 1 –49. 16. Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 3, passim. 17. Ibid., p. 25. 18. For an incisive, if brief, analysis of this in the context of Spanish guerrilla: Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, pp. 29–31. 19. Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (English trans., Cambridge, 1989) is now the classic formulation. 20. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York and London, 1939). Idem, Cio` che la storia potrebbe insegnare (Milan, 1958). Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of Elites (Ottowa, 1968). Idem, Treastise on General Sociology (New York, 1969), ch. 11. 21. On Mezzogiorno: Gaetano Cingari, Giacobini e sanfedisti in Calabria in 1799 (MessinaFlorence, 1957). Idem, Brigantaggio, proprietary e contadini nel Sud (Bari, 1976). Ugo Caldora, Calabria Napoleonica (Turin, 1935). Aurelio Lepre, Studi sul Regno di Napoli nel Decennio Francese (Naples, 1985). On similar developments in Andalusia: Jean-Marc Lafon, L’Andalousie et Napole´on. Contre-insurrection, collaboration et re´sistances dans le Midi de l’Espagne (1808–1812) (Paris, 2007). The classic study on Spanish collaboration remains Miguel Artola Gallego, Los Affrancesados (Madrid, 1954). 22. The classic study remains Louis Bergeron and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les ‘masses de granit’: Cent mille notables du Premier Empire (Paris, 1979). 23. ANP F 1e 61 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Gen. Bertrand, Governor-General Provinces illyriennes to Min of the Interior, 13 December 1811. 24. Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 277–8. 25. For the durability of this in the Kingdom of Naples: John A. Davis, Merchants, Monopolists and Contractors: A Study in Economic Activity and Society in Bourbon Naples (1815–1860) (New York, 1979). On the persistence of pro-Annona opinion in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy: Alain Pillpiche, Milan, capitale napole´onienne, 1800–1814 (Paris, 2001), pp. 215–19. On the workings of the system in the Savoyard ancien re´gime: Donatella Balani, Il Vicario tra Citta` e Stato. L’ordine pubblico e l’Annona nella Torino del Settecento (Turin, 1987). On ancien re´gime Rome: Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Re´gime (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 177 –89. 26. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 189. 27. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 83–95. 28. Vincenzo Paltrinieri, I moti contro Napoleone negli stati di parma e Piacenza (1805–1806) (Bologna, 1927), pp. 35 –6. 29. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, p. 86. 30. Braudel, Mediterranean, ‘Preface to the English Edition’, p. 13. 31. On Andalucia: Lafon, L’Andalusie, pp. 405–58. On Valencia: Timothy Gribaudi, ‘Pacification, collaboration and resistance in Napoleonic Valencia, 1812–1813’, unpublished MPhil thesis, Oxford, 2012. 32. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 168. 33. A discussion of this in English is in: Stuart Woolf, ‘French civilisation and ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past & Present 124/iii (1989), pp. 96–120. 34. Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle Histoire du Premier Empire, vol. 1: Napole´on et la conqueˆte de l’Europe, 1804– 1810 (Paris, 2002), p. 374. 35. Cited in Lentz, Nouvelle Histoire, p. 375. 36. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, p. 28.

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NOTES TO PAGES 14 –22

37. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, vol. 1, Book XIX (trans. Thomas Nugent, New York, 1949) p. 297. 38. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 170. 39. Ibid., p. 40. 40. Geoffrey Ellis, The Napoleonic Empire (Basingstoke, 2nd edn, 2003), pp. 117–18. 41. Geoffrey Ellis, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace (Oxford, 1981) is a seminal case study. 42. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 277. 43. Giuseppe Lombardi (ed.), La Guerra dei sale. Rivolte e frontier del Piemonte barocco, 3 vols (Milan, 1986). 44. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989); Michel Brunet, Le Roussillon: Une socie´te´ contre l’E´tat, 1780–1820 (Toulouse, 1986). 45. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 206. 46. Alexander Grab, ‘The Kingdom of Italy and the Continental Blockade’, in Katherine B. Aalestad and Johan Joor (eds), Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System: Local, Regional and European Experiences (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 104–5. 47. Cited in Marcel Dunan, Napole´on et l’Allemagne, le syste`me continental et les de´buts du Royaume de Bavie`e, 1806–1810 (Paris, 1942), pp. 284 –5. 48. Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 209–10. 49. Dunan, Napole´on et l’Allemagne, pp. 334–67. 50. Ibid., p. 337. 51. Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 103. 52. Silvia Margazagalli, ‘The Continental System: A View from the Sea’, in Aalestad and Joor, Revisiting, pp. 83– 97. 53. Alex Grab has detailed the rapid growth and considerable volume of the Maltese contraband trade: after the proclamation of the Blockade, British exports to Malta rose from £95,000 in 1805 to over £3 million by 1808 and to £5 million by 1812. There had been only five British merchants on the island in 1802; this rose to 60 by 1812, the year when 25 per cent of all British goods shipped to Europe went through Malta: Grab, ‘Kingdom of Italy’, in Aalestad and Joor, Revisiting, p. 103. This percentage is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that the British were also supplying a huge war effort in Iberia in 1812: Grab, ‘Kingdom of Italy’, in Aalestad and Joor, Revisiting, pp. 103 –4. 54. Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 188–223. 55. Roger Knight, Britain against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793–1805 (London, 2013), p. 402. 56. John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780– 1860 (Oxford, 2006), p. 221. 57. Davis, Naples and Napoleon, pp. 227–30. 58. Agustı´n Guimera Ravina, ‘Bloquero imperfect, Guerra anfibia y liderazago: Ca´diz, 1810’, in Manuel-Reyes Garcı´a Hurtado (ed.), La Armada espan˜ola en el siglo xviii. Ciencia, hombres y barcas (Madrid, 2010), pp. 207–32. 59. Guimera Ravina, ‘Bloquero’, passim. On the blockade of Barcelona: Juan Mercader Riba, Barcelona durante la ocupacio´n Francesca, 1808–1814 (Madrid, 1946). 60. In June 1812, the French sent a full scale invasion force to collect taxes and crush smuggling in the Ionian islands: Piero Pisani, La Dalmatie de 1797 a` 1815 (Paris, 1893), pp. 359 –60. 61. Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (London, 1995), vol. 7, pp. 81–3, 97.

NOTES TO PAGES 22 –29 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

311

Davis, Naples and Napoleon, pp. 151–5. Marzagalli, ‘Continental System’, in Aalestad and Joor, Revisiting, pp. 83 –4. Grab, ‘Kingdom of Italy’, in Aalestad and Joor, Revisiting, pp. 108–11. Antonielli, Livio, ‘L’Italia di Napoleone: tra imposizione e assimilazione di modelli istituzionali’, in Marco Bellabarba, Brigitte Mazohl, Reinhard Sauber and Marcello Verga (eds), Gli imperis dopi l’Impero nell’Europa del xix secolo (Bologna, 2005), pp. 409 –32, at 421. Antonielli, ‘L’Italia di Napoleone’, p. 417. Montesquieu, Voyages – Lettre sur Geˆnes, cited in Yyes Hersant (ed.), Italie. Anthologie des Voyageurs Franc
ais aux xviii et xix sie`cles (Paris, 1988), p. 315. Montesquieu, Voyage en Italie, cited in Italie. Anthologie, p. 339. Ibid., pp. 339–40. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC and London, 2007), pp. 52–86. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), pp. 54, 55. Laudatory accounts of the Chinese empire open Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), and conclude his L’Sie`cle de Louis XIV. Voltaire, Mahmet ou le fanatisme, cited in Henry Laurens, L’expe´diton d’E´gypte, 1798–1801 (Paris, 1997), p. 31. See especially Laurens, L’expe´diton d’E´gypte. The image of an ‘Orient’ based on Aristotle, and foreshadowing Edward Said’s conception of ‘Orientalism’, seems very evident in French (and British) attitudes to Ali Pasha in this period. For an overview of attitudes to Ali Pasha: Michael Broers, Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions (Long Hanborough, 2010), pp. 160 –672. For the conceptual framework: Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978). Montesquieu, Voyage en Italie, cited in Italie. Anthologie, p. 340. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), p. 57. Montesquieu, Conside´rations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur decadence (Paris, 1968, Garnier-Flammarion edn), p. 81, note 3. Montesquieu, Conside´rations, pp. 114–15. A recurrent theme in L’E´sprit des Lois and Conside´rations is the superiority of the Germanic influence on French history and culture, and of that of the Lombards, in northern Italy, a view rooted in climate, but bolstered by the claim of the parlements to be the heirs of the Frankish noble councils, and thus the creators of the French monarchy: Rosamund McKitterick, ‘The study of Frankish history in France and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Francia 8/ii (1980), pp. 556– 72. Cited in Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), p. 73. Dainotto also notes that ‘Sirocco’ derives from ‘Saracen’; the wind equates the south with the Saracens, an ‘east-west’, as well as a ‘north-south’, relationship: Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), p. 228, note 11. Broers, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, pp. 296 – 7. For a detailed analysis of the constitution of the Italian Republic: Emanuele Pagano, Enti locali e Stato in Italia sotto Napoleone. Repubbilca e Regno d’Italia (1802 – 1814) (Rome, 2007), pp. 21 – 6. For an analysis of this problem in the context of modern Italy: Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Shifting Identities: Nation, Region and City’, in Carl Levy (ed.), Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics (Oxford, 1996), pp. 33– 52. For a lucid analysis of how the ‘southern problem’ has been distorted by the Italian public sphere: John A. Davis, ‘Changing Perspectives on Italy’s “Southern Problem”’, in Levy, Italian Regionalism, pp. 53–68. Amidst a burgeoning literature: John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno 1860 – 1900 (New York, 1999); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius:

312

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

NOTES TO PAGES 29 – 41 Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, 2002); Claudia Petraccone, Le due civilta`: Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia dal 1860 al 1914 (Bari, 2000); Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford, 1998). Even so, the most powerful of these early critiques, that of Anquetil-Duperron in his Le´gislation orientale of 1778, detected it in his demonisation of a despotic and decadent ‘Orient’, rather than his dread of the Mediterranean ‘Other within’: Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), pp. 62 –3. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), pp. 64–5, draws out this theme which recurs throughout L’E´sprit des Lois. Montesquieu, Conside´rations, pp. 84–6. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, 2003), p. 5. Ibid., passim. This section is deeply indebted to Miche`le Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au sie`cle des Lumie`res (Paris, 1971; 1995 edn). See also idem, Diderot et l’histoire des Deux Indes ou l’e´criture fragmentaire (Paris, 1978). Cited in Duchet, Antropologie, pp. 211–12. For an analysis: Duchet, Antropologie, pp. 463 –8. On the legal reforms: Robert Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, 1973). Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility (London, 1967). Cited and translated in John G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 82– 3. For the 1752 English translation, cited in Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, p. 84. Thierry Lentz has observed that Books VI and VII of The Prince might have been ‘written to order’ for Napoleon: Lentz, Nouvelle Histoire, vol. 3, p. 14. Mona Ozouf, L’homme re´ge´ne´re´. Essais sur la Re´volution franc
aise (Paris, 1989), p. 124. This formulation of ‘police’ is indebted to the analysis of Voltaire’s work in Pocock, Narratives of Civil Government, pp. 83 –96. Woolf made his case in ‘French Civilisation’, ibid. Geoffrey Ellis countered this interpretation at length ‘The Nature of Napoleonic Imperialism’, in Philip Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (Harlow, 2001), pp. 97– 117. Woolf has since admitted the validity of Ellis’ criticisms on several occasions. Ellis’ argument challenges the bases of the chapters in this book, and many of its author’s works, but it is worth noting that Ellis’s case was made on empirical grounds, which did not wholly discount the validity of the concept of cultural imperialism, per se. Ozouf, L’homme re´ge´ne´re´, pp. 116– 17. The other being an initial belief in the almost miraculous spontaneity of renewal among the French: ibid., pp. 140, 145. Ibid., pp. 137–45. See above all: Aure´lien Lignereux, Servir Napole´on. Policiers et Gendarmes dans les de´partements annexes (1796–1814) (Seyssel, 2012). Ozouf, L’homme re´ge´ne´re´, p. 137. Ibid., pp. 138–45. For an overview of responses of this kind, on the centenary of the risings of 1799: Michael Broers, ‘Revolution and Risorgimento: The Heritage of the French Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, in Hayden T. Mason and William Doyle (eds), The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness (Gloucester, 1989), pp. 81 –90. For a case study: Brian Fitzpatrick, Catholic Royalism in the Department of the Gard, 1814– 1852 (Cambridge, 1983).

NOTES TO PAGES 41 –52

313

107. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 108. Ozouf, L’homme re´ge´ne´re´, p. 125.

Chapter 1

The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy

1. In a general context see especially: Carlo Capra, L’eta` rivoluzionaria e napoleonica in Italia, 1796– 1815 (Turin, 1978); Renzo de Felice, Italia Giacobina (Naples, 1965); Amando Saitta, Filippo Buonarotti, 2 vols (Rome, 1950); G. Vaccarino, I patriotti’anarchistes’ e l’idea dell’unita` italiana, 1796–1799 (Turin, 1955); Carlo Zaghi, La Rivoluzione francese el’italia (Naples, 1966); Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation (2 vols) (Paris, 1956). 2. Of particular interest: Delio Cantimori (ed.), Giacobini Italiani, vol. 1 (Bari, 1956), and D. Cantimori and R. de Felice (eds), Giacobini Italiani, vol. 2 (Bari, 1964), for important collections of writings on nationalism and unification in the period 1796–9. 3. Franco Valsecchi, L’Assolutismo illuminato in Austria e Lombardia, 2 vols (Bologna, 1934), vol. 2, pp. 197–287. 4. Among Cochin’s works see particularly: L’esprit du jacobinisme (republished 1979, Paris), ch. 6, ‘Le patriotisme humanitaire’. 5. Typical of this school is Giacomo Lumbroso, I moti popolari contro i Francesi, 1796–1800 (Florence, 1932). 6. Francesco Diaz, Francesco Maria Gianni: dalla burocrazia alia politica sotto Pietro Leopoldo di Toscana (Milan-Naples, 1966); Franz Pesendorfer, Ferdinando III e la Toscana in eta` napoleonica (Italian trans., Florence, 1986); Gabriele Turi, Viva Maria, la reazione aile riforme leopoldone (1790–1799) (Florence, 1969). 7. The literature on this period is copious; for a general account of the changes in Bourbon policy: Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 14 vols (Milan, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 136 –58. 8. For Tuscany, Turi, Viva Maria, pp. 139–74. For the Mezzogiorno, Gaetano Cingari, Brigantaggio, proprietari e contadini nel Sud (1799–1900) (Reggio Calabria, 1976), pp. 11– 34, outlines this process. For Piedmont, Michael Broers, ‘Revolution as vendetta: Patriotism in Piedmont, 1794–1821, Part I’, Historical Journal, forthcoming. 9. The classic account is Miguel Artola Gallego, Los afrancesados (Madrid, 1953). 10. Davide Forges Davanzati, G.A. Serrao vescovo di Potenza e la lotta dello stato contro la chiesa in Napoli nella seconda meta` del secolo xviii, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1937). 11. Saverio La Sorsa, I moti rivoluzionari a Molfetta nei primi mesi del 1799 (Trani, 1903), p. 41. 12. For this phenomenon in the Abruzzi, Luigi Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione francese negli Abruzzi, 1798–1810, 4 vols (l’Aquila, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 532–47. For a general survey of developments in Piedmont: Michael Broers, ‘The restoration of order in Napoleonic Piedmont, 1796–1814’, unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1986, pp. 121 –47. 13. Zaghi, La Rivoluzione, p. 129, draws attention to the importance of local conditions with reference to these revolts. 14. For a masterly treatment of vendetta in the context of the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge, 1988). 15. Cingari, Brigantaggio, p. 31; idem, Giacobini e Sanfedisti in Calabria (1978, Reggio Calabria), pp. 116, 119, 124.

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16. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 40–3; Tommaso Pedio, Uomini, aspirazioni e contrasti nella Basilicata del 1799 (Matera, 1961), pp. 31–2. 17. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 120, 126, 129–30. Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione, vol. 2, pp. 541–2. 18. An issue which forms the central theme of John A. Davies, Conflict and Control, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London, 1988). 19. Zaghi, La Rivoluzione, pp. 141–67, gives a clear summary of the revolt and the complex relationships of Bologna, Ferrara and Lugo. 20. Broers, ‘Restoration’, pp. 128–38; Domenico Occelli, Il Monregalese nel periodo storico napoleonico (Vignone, 1926). For the tradition of recalcitrance, Geoffrey Symcox, Victor Amadeus II (London, 1983), pp. 82–9. 21. The risings in the Abruzzi are among the best chronicled; in addition to Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione, see Giuseppe Rivera (ed.), L’Invasione francese in Abruzzo, 1792–1799 (l’Aquila, 1988). 22. For a comparative perspective, F. Gunther Eyck, Loyal Rebels, Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean Uprising of 1809 (Lanham, 1986), a theme which informs the whole study. 23. Davis, Law and Order, p. 33; ibid., pp. 103–6 for their attachment to traditional guild organisation. The classic study of the lazzaroni is: A. Consiglio, Lazzari e santa fede, rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Milan, 1936). 24. Niccolo Rodolico, Il Popolo agli inizi del Risorgimento nell’ Italia Me´ridionale, 1799–1801 (Florence, 1925), p. 120. 25. Davis, Law and Order, p. 33. 26. Rodolico, Il Popolo, p. 124. 27. Ruffo to Acton, 6 February 1799, in Benedetto Croce (ed.), La Riconquista del Regno di Napoli nel 1799: lettere del Cardinale Ruffo, del Re, della Regina e del Ministro Acton (Bari, 1943), p. 10. 28. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 175–7. 29. There were important exceptions to this, particularly in the Basilicata: Pedio, Uomini, p. 21, and in a few parts of Calabria: Cingari, Giacobini, p. 208 on the patriot stronghold of Cortone. La Sorsa, I moti, p. 34, note 1, on the republican town of Altamura in Puglia. 30. The classic studies are: Giuseppe Prato, La vita econo´mica in Piemonte a meta` del secolo xviii (Turin, 1908), and Salvatore Pugliese, Due secoli di vita agricola: produzione e valore dei terreni, contratti agrari, salari e prezzi nel Vercellese nei secoli xviii e xix (Turin, 1908). 31. J. Felix-Bouvier, ‘La re´volte de Pavie’, Revue Historique de la Re´volution franc
aise, 2 (1911), 519–39, at pp. 533–4; A. Zanolini, A. Ae´dini ed. i suoi tempi, 2 vols (Florence, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 138–9; Zaghi, La Rivoluzione, p. 129, for an overview. 32. Michele Ruggiero, La Rivolta dei Contadini Piemontesi (Turin, 1974), pp. 136 –7. 33. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 181–2. 34. Ruggiero, La Rivolta, p. 134. 35. Michele Ruggiero, Briganti del Piemonte napoleonico (Turin, 1968), pp. 80–2. 36. For a general survey, Broers, ‘Restoration’, pp. 125– 37. 37. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 179 – 82. On Fra Diavolo, idem, Brigantaggio, pp. 35 – 84. 38. Cingari, Giacobini, pp. 250– 1. J.A. Davis, ‘Les sanfedistes dans le royaume de Naples’, in F. Lebrun and R. Dupuy (eds), Les re´sistances a` la Re´volution (Paris, 1987), pp. 311–20 (pp. 314–15). 39. Ruggiero, La Rivolta, p. 134. 40. Symcox, Victor Amadews II, pp. 82– 9. 41. Broers, ‘Restoration’, pp. 132–3. 42. Ruggiero, La Rivolta, p. 134. 43. La Sorsa, I moti, pp. 56–9.

NOTES TO PAGES 56 – 63 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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Ibid., p. 123. Francesco Carabellese (ed.), In Terra di Bari dal 1799 al 1806 (Trani, 1900), p. Ii. Ibid., p. xxxviii. Rodolico, Il Popolo, pp. 55–6. Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione, pp. ii, 535. Rodolico, Il Popolo, pp. 59–60. Ibid., p. 59, note 1. Ibid., p. 57. Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione, and Rivera, L’Invasione are very extensive sources, attesting to a strong local interest in these events. Ottorino Morra, L’Insorgenza antifrancese di Tolfa durante la Repubblica Romana del 1798– 1799 (Rome, 1942), pp. 15 –16. Morra, L’Insorgenza, pp. 40– 64. Ibid., pp. 65–93. ANP F 7 8894, Director-General police, Rome to Min., 3 arrond., police, 23 July 1811. Ibid. ANP F 7 8894, Min., 3 arrond., police, to Director-General police, Rome, 29 September 1811. ANP F 7, Director-General police, Rome, to Min., 3 arrond., police, 31 October 1811. Morra, L’Insorgenza, pp. 16– 31, for a factual narrative. Ibid., pp. 99–102. Turi, Viva Maria and Cingari, Giacobini, are two studies which support this interpretation. Coppa-Zuccari, L’Invasione, vol. 3, Angelo De Jacobis, ‘Cronaca degli avvenimenti in Teramo ed altri luoghi d’Abruzzo, 1777–1822’, 2(a)–244(A), 47(A)–48(A). Ibid., 61(A). Turi, Viva Maria and Diaz, Gianni, are the two main accounts of this process. On Sicily, Francesco Renda, La Sicilia nel 1812 (Rome, 1963); J. Rosselli, Bentinck and the British Occupation of Sicily, 1811 – 1814 (Cambridge, 1956). On Sardinia, Girolamo Sotigu`, Storia della Sardegna Sabauda (Rome-Ban, 1984), pp. 221 –59. Giuseppe Andre´, Nizza, 1792–1814 (Nice, 1894). Michael Broers, ‘Piedmont: An Absolutist State Confronts Revolution’, in F. Paknadel (ed.), La Mediterrane´e au xviii sie`cle (Aix, 1987), pp. 19–40 is a tentative attempt to analyse this question in a Piedmontese context. A perceptive analysis for the west of France is R. Dupuy, ‘Le roi de la contre-re´volution: de la chevauche´e repressive au providentialisme re´actionnaire’, in C. Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Aylesbury, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 193–203. Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires (Paris, 1967, edn. Garnier-Flammarion), p. 63. Prominent among the many contributions on this issue: R. Dupuy, De la Re´volution a` la Chouannerie (Paris, 1988); T.C.W. Blanning, ‘The Role of Religion in European CounterRevolution, 1789– 1815’, in D. Beales and G. Best (eds), History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge, 1985). Above all, the whole corpus of work by T. Tackett. Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), Part I, ‘The Church of the Old Regime’. Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind (London and Newhaven, 1987). Ibid., pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 7, for an apt example. Independent, 23 March 1989.

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Chapter 2 The Myth and Reality of Italian Regionalism: A Historical Geography of Napoleonic Italy, 1801– 14 1. For an exploration of this at the supra-regional level, see Michael Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe’, Historical Journal 44/i (2001), pp. 135 –54. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (London, 1984), pp. 118 –19, 122. 3. Such a juxtaposition was not typical of the whole of Napoleonic Europe; conditions in the Rhineland, for example, appear very different. See Michael Rowe, ‘Between Empire and Home Town: Napoleonic Rule on the Rhine, 1799–1814’, Historical Journal 42/iii (1999), pp. 643–74. 4. The Napoleonic reordering of Italy left the southern Kingdom of Naples intact territorially, and the natural response of historians has been to continue to treat it as a historical and geographical unit, despite the change of regime. 5. The Kingdom of Italy lumped together the Habsburg province of Lombardy with the Duchy of Modena, the papal provinces of the Legations around Bologna, and, after 1807, the Italian territories of the Venetian Republic. 6. This is not to argue that other parts of Italy did not share many characteristics with the states of the de´partements re´unis, any more than it is to dispute the importance of intense localism, campanilismo, by positing the existence of macro-regions. Modena was entirely part of this complex, separated from it only by the new Napoleonic political boundaries that placed it in the Kingdom of Italy. The mainland Kingdom of Naples, too, was part of the Apennine spine, and had much in common with these states. Neapolitan political culture was somewhat different from that of the states of the northern Apennine spine, however, for reasons more historical than geographic. The prevalence of feudalism in the southern kingdom and a deep-rooted political culture of opposition to it, both among the educated elites of the capital, Naples, and within the rural bourgeoisie, the galant’uomini, were elements of much less significance in the states of the future de´partements re´unis. Geography could unite on the one hand, but political conditions, shaped by political history, could also divide. 7. For Adrian Lyttleton, ‘The territorial states of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries each had their distinctive style of government and “political personality”. These differences in state traditions were decisive for the constitution of regional identities’; Lyttleton, ‘Shifting Identities: Nation, Region and City’, in Carl Levy (ed.), Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics (Oxford, 1996), pp. 33–52. For a regional study of different legal traditions at work in one state, see Giovanni Santini, La stato estense tra riforme e rivoluzione (Milan, 1987). 8. Giddens, Constitution of Society, p. 122. 9. Italian scholars in this group are centred on the journal Meridiana. For its major exponents in English, see the collection of essays in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford, 1998). See also John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (London, 1999), for a fine analysis of the ‘southern problem’ in cultural terms. 10. Giddens, Constitution of Society, p. 122. 11. Franca Assante, ‘Le trasformazioni del paesaggio agrario’, in Angelo Massafra (ed.), II mezzogiomo preunitario (Bari, 1988), p. 22; cited in English in Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento (London, 1994), p. 58.

NOTES TO PAGES 67 –69

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12. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 3 vols (London, 1975), vol. 1, p. 33. This judgement is supported by recent local studies. Of particular relevance in this context is Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population, and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989). 13. F. Gunther von Eyck, Loyal Rebels: Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean Uprising of 1809 (New York, 1986). 14. Alex Grab, ‘State Power, Brigandage and Rural Resistance in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly 25 (1995): pp. 39–70. It should be noted that, although the epicentre of the 1809 revolt fell within the Kingdom of Italy, this same area in the Apennines west of Bologna had belonged not to the Habsburgs but to the Papal States prior to Napoleonic rule. 15. ‘The mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilisations, which are urban and lowland achievements. Their history is to have none, to remain almost always on the fringe of the great waves of civilisation, even the longest and most persistent, which may spread over great distances in the horizontal plane but are powerless to move vertically when faced with an obstacle of a few hundred meters’. Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 1, p. 34. 16. For a prescient, realistic analysis of the re-emergence of the politics of division, written early in the process, see the unjustly neglected Giorgio Bocca, La disunita d’Italia (Milan, 1990). More recent scholarship includes Anna Cento Bull, ‘Ethnicity, Racism and the Northern League’, in Levy, Italian Regionalism, pp. 171–87; Ilvo Diamanti, La Lega: Geografia, storia e sociologia di un nuovo soggetto politico (Rome, 1993). 17. This important point has been raised recently in the pages of the American Historical Review, in relation to concrete historical contexts in a series of articles: ‘Review Essays: Orientalism Twenty Years On’, AHR 105 (2000). A perceptive analysis in an imperial context broadly contemporaneous with the present one is Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, AHR 107 (2002), pp. 768–96. 18. The classic studies remain William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964); McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modem Times (Princeton, NJ, 1983). 19. Daniel Nordman, Frontieres de France: De l’espace au territoire (Paris, 1998), pp. 514–15. 20. Giddens, Constitution of Society, p. 126. 21. In sociology, see Giddens, Constitution of Society, pp. 130 –1. In historical geography, Sidney Tarrow, Between Centre and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France (New Haven, 1977), offers an important, pioneering critique of traditional models in historical geography and political science, which depend on diffusionist models that characterise the periphery as isolated and dependent on the centre, politically, culturally and economically. For political dependency, see Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 1964). For cultural dependency, Alessandro Pizzorno, ‘Amoral Familialism and Historical Marginality’, in Mattei Dogan and Richard Rose (eds), European Politics: A Reader (London, 1971), pp. 87–98, which is deeply indebted to Gramsci. For a Marxist approach to economic dependency, Ronald J. Johnston, Geography and the State: An Essay in Political Geography (London, 1982). Edward Shils, Centre and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), is, perhaps, the classic statement of the diffusionist view of centre–periphery relations, but is more sensitive to regional and historical nuances than many later studies. 22. An institution common to all the great cities and states of the Italian ancien re´gime, well defined by Gregory Hanlon as ‘the array of government intervention mechanisms and

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23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

NOTES TO PAGES 69 –70 regulations in the sector of provisioning and distributing food and essential items to the population, indispensable because of frequent dearth’. Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550– 1800 (London, 2000), p. 421. For an overview of the workings of the annona, see pp. 96– 102. For the annona in Turin, where the municipality and the royal government worked in close partnership – and where the state often had to prod the municipal officials to extend its charity beyond the walls of Turin in times of acute crisis – see Donatella Balani, II vicario tra citta e stato: L’ordine pubblico e l’annona nella Torino del settecento (Turin, 1987). On the dominant role of the Church in the administration of charity in Parma, and the general absence of the secular state in this form of social control in the duchies, see Michela Dall’Aglio Maramotti, L’assistenza ai poveri nella Parma del Settecento (Parma, 1985). For the Papal States: Alberto Guenzi, ‘Sistema annonario e controllo sociale a Bologna nei secoli XVII e XVIII’, in Ercole Sori (ed.), Citta e controllo sociale in Italia tra XVIII e XIX secolo (Milan, 1982), pp. 293–305; Gregori Fiocca, ‘Struttura urbana e controlo sociale a Roma nel ’700 e nel primo ’800: Mobilta sociale, paesaggio urbano ed enti di sorveglianza pontifici’, in Sori, Citta e controllo sociale, pp. 381–99. On Liguria: Giovanni Assereto, ‘I gruppi dirigenti liguri tra le fine vecchio regime e l’annessione all’Impero Napoleonico’, Quademi storici 37 (1978), pp. 73–101, 76–7. On the cultural attraction of the centre, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992); Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (London, 1970). See above all, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethe’s Travels in Italy: Together with His Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, trans. A.J.W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet (London, 1885). On the traditional concept of the Renaissance cultural centres, Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1 –17. For the ancien re´gime, see Osvaldo Raggio, Faida e parentela, lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990); Giovanni Tocci, Le terre traverse: Poteri e territori nei ducati dei Parma e Piacenza tra Sei e Settecento (Bolgona, 1985). For modern Italy, see the collection of essays in Levy, Italian Regionalism. Robert L. Edmonds, Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan: A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy (Chicago, 1985); David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, MA, 1980). These studies are all the more important because they make the clear distinction between frontier and periphery, and between centre and ecumene. Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573– 1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modem Society (Edinburgh, 1986). The significance of the frontier to the central core of states has been much debated, and the nature of such relationships remains in dispute. This has largely centred on the Turner thesis as applied to American history, but the implications of this thesis for European borders might have relevance for the formation of national identities, as well as regional ones. Together with Turner’s own oeuvre, those who initiated the debate were George R. Taylor, The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston, 1956); Ray A. Billington, The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (New York, 1966); David W. Noble, Historians against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis, MN, 1965). For several European studies moving in this direction, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA, 1989); Alex V. Murray, Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150–1500 (Aldershot, 2001); Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000).

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28. Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London, 1962), p. 470. 29. Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh, 1991). 30. Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (London, 1997, 4th edn), p. 7. 31. John A. Davis, ‘Casting Off the “Southern Problem”: Or the Peculiarities of the South Reconsidered’, in Schneider, Italy’s ‘Southern Question’, pp. 205 –24, 217. 32. Lyttleton, Italian Regionalism, p. 44. 33. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Lyttleton also underlines the disappointment of many liberal supporters of unification, particularly in Lombardy and Tuscany, who had hoped to see the end of Austrian centralisation, only to find it replaced by a unitary state equally committed to stifling regional autonomy; pp. 39–43. 34. Ironically, the presence of effective parliamentary institutions-unthinkable under Napoleon provided the conduit through which the old culture of patronage survived and national political parties remained coalitions of local interests. Levy, Italian Regionalism, pp. 3–5, stresses the regional nature of both Christian Democrat and Communist support in modern politics. See Alessandro Pizzorno, ‘Amoral Familialism’, on the consequences of the absence of patronage for a region. Tarrow, Between Centre and Periphery, emphasises the positive nature of the relationship between centre, periphery and political patronage. 35. Giddens, Constitution of Society, pp. 114–18. 36. The mainland possessions of the House of Savoy, collectively known as Piedmont; Liguria, officially known as the Republic of St George; the united Duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; the Duchy of Modena; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; Venice, officially the Republic of St Mark; the Habsburg territories centred on the Duchy of Milan, or Lombardy; the city state Republic of Lucca; the Papal States; the mainland possessions of the Kingdom of Naples. 37. This process began in Piedmont, which was occupied definitively in 1800, and shifted progressively south to Liguria and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza in 1805, to Tuscany in 1808, and finally to the Papal States in 1810. These territories eventually became the 14 imperial departments of the Italian section of the French Empire: Dora, Stura, Po, Marengo and Sesia, carved from Piedmont; Montenotte, Genoa and Apennines, from Liguria; Taro, made up of the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; Mediterranean, Arno and Ombronne, from Tuscany; and Rome (first called Tiber) and Trasimeno, from those parts of the Papal States not already annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. One Piedmontese department, Tanaro, was dissolved in 1804. 38. Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 1, p. 25. 39. Derwent Whittlesey, ‘The Impress of Effective Central Authority upon the Landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 25 (1935), pp. 85–97. 40. For an overview in English, see Michael Broers, ‘The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 33 (1989), pp. 159 –73. 41. There is a vast historiography on the Italian Jacobins. For a recent discussion of ‘the canon’, see the introduction to Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821: State-Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997). 42. Well analysed in John A. Davis, ‘The Napoleonic Era in Southern Italy: An Ambiguous Legacy?’, Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1991), pp. 133–48. 43. Raggio, Faida, is a study of such a northern region. According to Ernest Gellner, ‘A state may have partial control of outlying geographic areas . . . It may then hand over power in them to individuals who in name may be its officials, but who in fact possess a local

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45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

NOTES TO PAGES 74 –76 power base, and who mediate between central requirements and local interests’; Gellner, ‘Introduction’, in Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, 1977), pp. 1–7, 3. On the ecclesiastical need for denunciations, see Elena Brambilla, Aile origini del sant’Uffizio: Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al XVI secolo (Bologna, 2000), pp. 504 –13, 541–4. On the more general negotiation culture of Italians, see David Gentilcore, ‘The Ethnography of Everyday Life’, in John A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2002), pp. 188–205, 191–3. Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, pp. 298 –9. The classic general study remains Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols (Turin, 1969– 90), vol. 1: Da Muratori a Beccaria (1969); vol. 2: La chiesa e Ia repubblica dentro iloro limiti, 1758– 1764 (1976); vol. 5: L’Italia dei lumi (1987, 1990). On Tuscany, see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527– 1800 (Chicago, IL, 1973); Furio Diaz, Francesco Maria Gianni: Dalla burocrazia aliapolitica sotto Pietro Leopolda di Toscana (MilanNaples, 1966); Bernardo Sordi, L’amministrazione illuminata: Riforme delle comunita e progetti di costituuzione nella Toscana Leopoldina (Milan, 1991). On the collapse of Guillaume Du Tillot’s work in Parma, see Giovanni Tocci, ‘II Ducato di Parma e Piacenza’, in Lino Marini, Giovanni Tocci and Cesare Mozzarelli (eds), I Ducati padani, Trento e Trieste, vol. 17: Storia d’Italia, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Turin, 1979), pp. 306–7. On Liguria, see Giovanni Assereto, La Repubblica ligure: Lotte politische e problemi finanziari (1797–1799) (Turin, 1975). On the collapse of the economic reforms, see Gabriella Turi, ‘Viva Maria!’ La reazione aileriforme Ieopoldine, 1790–1799 (Florence, 1969). On the religious reforms, see Carlo Fantappie, Riforme ecclesiastiche e resistenze sociali: La sperimentazione istituzionale nella diocesi di Prato alia fine dell’antico regime (Bologna, 1986), which points to the importance of rural revolt as a spur to urban protest. On the later reaction, Franz Pesendorfer, Ferdinanda III e Ia Toscana in eta napoleonica (Ital. trans. Franca Cattaneo and Marco Nardi, Florence, 1986). Later French officials often remarked on the ‘lax’ and lenient character of Tuscan justice and the popular support it received; see Michael Broers, ‘Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy’, Past and Present 170 (2001), pp. 152–80. On the guilds, see Corine Maitte, ‘Le reformisme eclaire et les corporations: L’abolition des Arts en Toscane’, Revue d’histoire modeme et contemporaine 49 (2002), pp. 56–88. On the confraternities, Fantappie, Riforme ecclesiastiche. Adriano Prosperi, ‘Otras Indias: Missionari della Contra-Riforma tra contadini e selvaggi’, in Scienze, credenze, occulte, livelli di cultura. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Florence, 1980 (Florence, 1982), pp. 205–34. Raggio, Faida, p. ix. The importance of the informal nature of the ancien re´gime state and of flexible relationships that blur the boundaries of Ju¨rgen Habermas’s public and private spheres interests historians of the court while still stressing the centrality of the transition from mediaeval to modern institutions, as in the collection of essays Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age (Oxford, 1991). In the concluding chapter of this volume, Robert J.W. Evans notes the importance of courtly patronage as a link between centre and periphery: ‘Patronage provided the social rationale of the court, but also distributing it through vertical networks of clientage, a two-way bond between the greater courtiers and their private retinue of supporters on the fringe or in specific regions. Such patronage proved a necessary mechanism even for the most efficient and devoted of rulers.’ Evans, ‘The Court: A Protean Institution and an Elusive Subject’, pp. 481 –91, 488.

NOTES TO PAGES 76 –78

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51. On the legislation, see Mario Viora, Le costituzioni piemontesi (Rome, 1928). On the attempts to enforce it, La gue’a del sale, 1680–1699: Rivolte e frontiere del Piemonte barocco, ed. Giuseppe Lombardi, 3 vols (Milan, 1986). This is not to deny the continued presence of a reforming, statist impulse within the Savoyard state, which bridged the gap between an older generation of absolutist officials and the emergence of civil servants more influenced by currents of the Enlightenment during the late eighteenth century. Their impact remained marginal, at the level of practical social control, however, despite their shared determination to advance state power; see Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Gli strumenti dell’assolutismo sabaudo: Segretarie di stato e consiglio delle finanze nel XVIII secolo’, Rivista storica italiana 102 (1990), pp. 796 –873. There was a conscious, deliberately fostered and reinforced division between the higher, royal magistracy in the Senate of Turin and the judges of the provincial and municipal courts, which resurfaced again, after the end of Napoleonic rule; see Isidoro Soffietti, ‘Sulla storia dei principi dell’oralita del contraddittorio e della pubblicita nel procedimento penale: II period della Restaurazione nel Regno di Sardegna’, Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 59 (1971–2), pp. 125 –241. 52. The Savoyards coerced many imperial fiefs in the Apennines, insofar as they constituted a challenge to their own power, but they could neither uproot them nor effectively reduce their local authority. For this problem in the Ligurian and Piedmontese Apennines, see Giuseppe Bracco, I feudiimperiali del Tortonese (sec. XI–XIX) (Turin, 1956). Practical control of the related problems of smuggling and banditry also eluded Turin, despite the ferocity of its legislation. The monarchy had an almost traditional antipathy to the collective, public aspects of popular religion, but its persistent attempts to curb such excesses had little lasting impact; see Angelo Torre, ‘Politics Cloaked in Worship: State, Church and Local Power in Piedmont, 1570–1770’, Past and Present 134 (1992), pp. 43–92; Luciano Allegra, ‘Stato e monopolio del controllo sociale: II caso del Piemonte fra ’700 e ’800’, in Angelo Pastore and Paolo Sorcinelli (eds), Emarginazione, crimina/ita e devianza in Italia fra ’600 e ’900 (Milan, 1990), pp. 77 –84. 53. Michael Broers, ‘La crisi delle Comunita piemontesi fra ancien regime e Impero Napoleonico’, in Giuseppe Ricuperati (ed.), Quando San Secondo divento` giacobino: Atti del Convegno ‘Asti repubblicana: Bicentenario della Repubblica astese: 1797–1997’ (Alessandria, 1999), pp. 399–411. 54. ANP F 7 8919 (Police-General, department Sture), d’Auzers to Min. 3 arrond., PoliceGeneral, 11 July 1811. 55. Indeed, the importance of communication networks is now increasingly recognised by historians in many periods and contexts; see Brambilla, Aile origini; Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780– 1870 (Cambridge, 1996). 56. Lattimore, Frontier History, p. 470. 57. David A. Bell, ‘Culture and Religion’, in William Doyle (ed.), Old Regime France (Oxford, 2001), pp. 78 –104, 90– 1. 58. Broers, ‘Cultural Imperialism’. 59. For an exploration of this in a military context, see Michael Broers, ‘Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800–1814’, War in History 8/iii (2001), pp. 251– 70. 60. Frederic Bluche, Le Bonapartisme: Aux origines de la Droite autoritaire, 1800–1850 (Paris, 1980). 61. Bayly, Empire and Information; Hugh Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico (London, 1993).

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NOTES TO PAGES 78 –79

62. The two studies that stress the town-country nature of the political divide in the west are Charles Tilly, The Vende´e (Cambridge, MA, 1964); and Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest: Des structures economiques et sociales aux opinions politiques depuis l’epoque revolutionnaire dans le Sarthe (Le Mans, 1960). On the urban ‘siege mentality’ in the Vende´e during the Hundred Days, see Robert S. Alexander, Bonapartism and the Revolutionary Tradition in France: The Federes of 1815 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 42, 60, 107– 54, 238. Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770– 1796 (Oxford, 1982), reveals that these divisions reached deep into parts of the countryside as well, while not negating the urban core of the revolution in Brittany. For a fine overview of the Vende´e, see Jean-Clement Martin, La Vende´e et la France (Paris, 1987). 63. Shils, Centre and Periphery, p. 3. 64. Whereas all prefects in the two kingdoms were natives, only three Piedmontese served as prefects for any length of time in the de´partements re´unis: San Martino della Motta, in the Sesia (1803– 14), and Degregori-Marcoregno (1801–1804) and Arborio-Biamino (1804–10), both in the Stura. A Ligurian noble, Brignole, served briefly as Prefect of Montenotte, 1813– 14. 65. Indeed, even before Gendarmerie units arrived in the Tuscan departments, the French had deployed regular Tuscan cavalry and their own troops to do this service on an interim basis: Archives de La Guerre, Correspondance, Arme´e d’Italie, C4 –93: Correspondance du Ge´neral Reille pendant sa mission en Toscane (1807–8). 66. For an overview of this in the de´partements re´unis, see Michael Broers, ‘The Police and the Padroni: Italian Notabili, French Gendarmes and the Origins of the Centralised State in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly 26 (1996), pp. 331 – 53. 67. For an overview, see Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 1999), pp. 191– 207. For local studies in the ex-Kingdom of Italy, see Steven C. Hughes, Crime, Disorder and the Risorgimento: The Politics of Policing in Bologna (Cambridge, 1994); David Laven, ‘Law and Order in Habsburg Lombardy, 1814–1835’, Historical Journal 39/ii (1996), pp. 383–403. On areas formerly in the de´partements re´unis, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 513 –20; Alan J. Reinermann, ‘The Failure of Counter-Revolution in Risorgimento Italy: The Case of the Centurions, 1831–1847’, Historical Journal 34/ii (1991), pp. 21–41. 68. For a succinct overview of the social composition of the electoral colleges of the de´partements re´unis and the two kingdoms, see Carlo Capra, ‘Nobili, notabili, elites: Dal “modello” francese al caso italiano’, Quademi storici 37 (1978), pp. 12 – 42. For regional studies in the de´partements re´unis, Louis Bergeron, ‘La place des gens d’affaires dans les listes de notables du premier empire, d’apre`s les exemples du Piemont et de La Ligurie’, Annuario dell’Istituto storico italiano 23 – 4 (1971 – 72), pp. 316 – 34. Marco Violardo, II notabilato piemontese da Napoleone a Carlo Alberto (Turin, 1995), regards participation in the lower levels of the local assemblies as an important step forward for municipal leaders in gaining political experience, in contrast to the general indifference of the ‘higher notables’ to the departmental colleges, pp. 98 – 102. 69. Armando Saitta, ‘Appunti per una ricerca sui notabili nell’Italia napoleonica’, Critica storica 9 (1972), pp. 53– 91. 70. Capra, ‘Nobili, notabili’. 71. Davis, ‘Napoleonic Era in Southern Italy’. 72. On Piedmont, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 459–65. Giovanni Fabbroni was a Leopoldine bureaucrat, well respected by the French for his reform of the Tuscan Mint, who used his position in the imperial administration to further the fortunes of his family, and extend his network of clients, in a very traditional manner. His network of clients

NOTES TO PAGES 79 –81

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

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survived the fall of the empire and protected him under the Restoration. Renato Pasta, Scienza, politica e rivoluzione: L’opera di Giovanni Fabbroni (1752 –1822), intellettuale e funzionario al servizio dei Lorena (Florence, 1989), pp. 535–80. The problem of staffing the lowest echelons of the administration – the maires, communal councils, justiceships of the peace – was a problem intrinsic to all regimes in this period. It was common to the ‘interior’ of the Napoleonic empire, that is, France itself, as well as to the Italian departments and the satellite kingdoms. As such, it was not a specifically ‘imperial’ problem; see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789 – 1820s (New York, 1994), pp. 35 – 6, 113 – 43, 307 – 12. Alex Grab, ‘From the French Revolution to Napoleon’, in John A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796– 1900 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 25–50, 36–7. In Naples, Murat sought to confine all senior posts to natives of the kingdom; see Grab, p. 42. On Zurlo and Ricciardi, the ministers of finance and justice respectively, of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples, see Pasquale Villani, Mezzogiomo tra riforme e rivoluzione (Bari, 1973), p. 209 and following. On Melzi, see John M. Roberts, ‘Francesco Melzi d’Eril, and Italian statesman (1796– 1806)’, DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1954; Carlo Zaghi, Napoleone e l’Italia (Naples, 1966); on Aldini and Prina, Livio Antonielli, I prefetti dell’Italia Napoleonica (Bologna, 1983). For an important re-evaluation of the prefects, which actually stresses even their subordinate status in the structure of imperial government, see Edward A. Whitcomb, ‘Napoleon’s Prefects’, AHR 79 (1974), pp. 1089 – 1118. On Condove, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 449 –50. On Botton, Giorgio Vaccarino, ‘UgoVincenzo di Castellamonte: L’esperienza giacobina di un illuminista piemontese’, Bolletino storico bibliografico subalpino 63 (1965), pp. 161–202. Charles Boyer, ‘La famille de Cavour et le regime napoleonien’, Revue historique 185 (1939), pp. 326–45; Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 4th edn, 3 vols (Bari, 1969– 84), vol. 1. ANP F 7 6531 (Police-General, department Rome), Director-General Police, Rome to Min. 3 arrond., Police-General, 10 October 1812. ANP F 7 8818 (Police-General, department Genes), Commissaire-General Police, Genoa to Min. 3 arrond., Police-General, 24 June 1809. ANP F 7 8818 (Police-General, department Genes), Prefect of Genoa to Min. 3 arrond., Police-General, 14 April 1808. The work of Raggio on the valley of the Fontanabuona in the early modern period lends a fair degree of accuracy to the opinion of the Prefect; see Raggio, Faida. The anti-French revolt of 1797 in Liguria actually reveals the partnership between the urban elites and the highlanders, an example of centre and periphery influencing each other, along traditional patterns, already evident during the anti-Austrian rising of 1746; see Assereto, La Repubblica ligure, pp. 56– 8. The classic account of the 1746 revolt makes no attempt to hide this; Gian-Franco Doria, Storia di Genova, 1745–1750 (Genoa, 1747), p. 174 and following. ANP F 7 6531 (Police-General, department Rome), Director-General Police, Rome to Min. 3 arrond., Police-General, 3 November 1812. Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford, 1984), p. 104. Powis follows the thesis of Kenneth B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973). The concept of feudal justice had not penetrated the scattered Apennine imperial fiefs, beyond financial impositions; see Braude, Mediterranean, vol. 1, 38 –9. On the mediaeval

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85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

NOTES TO PAGES 81 – 94 Apennines, see Chris Wickham, The Mountain and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988). See Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, 1801–1814: The War against God (London, 2002). Brambilla, Aile origini, pp. 503– 13. ANP F 7 8826 (Genes), ‘Rapport administratif et politique de La ville de Genes’, January 1811; cited in Broers, Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, p. 173. Hanlon, Early Modem Italy, p. 304. Raggio, Faida, p. xvi. Louise Benton, ‘Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisidictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), pp. 563 –88. Gellner, Patrons and Clients, p. 5. Giddens, Constitution of Society, p. 122.

Chapter 3 A Clash of Enlightenments: Judicial Reform in the Napoleonic Republic and Kingdom of Italy 1. The research for this chapter was carried out with the help of a British Academy Small Grant in Aid of Research, in the Archivio di Stato di Milano, in September–October 2010. The author wishes to express his deep thanks to the Academy for its generosity, as well as to the staff of the Archivio di Stato di Milano, and to his colleagues, Professor Livio Antonielli and Professor Alex Grab, for their kind welcome and help in Milan, as well as to the Caiani family, for their friendship and warm welcome to me over those weeks. 2. For recent overviews of ancien re´gime Italy: Marino John A. (ed.), Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2002). Gregory Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550 – 1800 (Basingstoke, 2002). On Modena: Giovanni Santini, Lo stato estense tra riforme e rivoluzione (Milan, 1987). 3. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966), p. 3. 4. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), p. 11. 5. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750– 1790 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 5–7. 6. On the creation of the civil administration under Napoleon: Livio Antonielli, Le Prefetti dell’Italia Napoleonica (Bologna, 1983); Emanuele Pagano, Enti locali e stato in Italia sotto Napoleone. Republlica e Regno d’Italia (1802–1814) (Rome, 2007); Alain Pillepich, Milan, capitlale napole´onienne, 1800–1814 (Paris, 2001). See also the relevant essays in: Adele Robbiati Bianchi (ed.), La Formazione del Primo Stato italiano e Milano capitale, 1802– 1814 (Milan, 2006). 7. Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For or Against? (first English trans., London, 1949). 8. For a study that shows the importance of the magistrate as arbiter: Osvaldo Raggio, Faide e Parentele. Lo stato Genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990). 9. Archivio di Stato di Milano (afterwards ASM) Serie Atti di Governo, Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna, Pezzo 14, Ragionamento preliminare del Codice Civile della Republlica Italiana (1804).

NOTES TO PAGES 95 –109

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10. Ugo Petronio, La Lotta per la Codificazione (Turin, 2002), p. 325. 11. Petronio, La Lotta, pp. 324–5. 12. For a recent account: Jean-Louis Halpe´rin, ‘Le re´gard de l’historien’, in Le Code Civil, 1804– 2004. Livre du Bicentenaire (Paris, 2004), pp. 43–58. 13. Riccardo Ferrante, ‘Dans l’Ordre E´tabli par le Code Civil’. La scienza del dirrito al tramonto dell’illuminismo giuridico (Milan, 2002), pp. 95 –8. Ferrante also shows that, as late as 1810– 11, French inspectors found the same attitude in their own law schools, where Roman law was still being taught as if it was in force, as opposed to being a key element in the intellectual history that the Code Napoleon derived from. 14. Cited in Ferrante: ‘Dans l’Ordre E´tabli’, pp. 96, 99. 15. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 49, Proclamation of Min of Justice to the Proc’s and Tribunals of K of Italy, 6 March 1806. 16. Ibid. 17. Israel: Democratic Enlightenment, p. 337, holds up Beccaria, in particular, as a figure who saw himself as ‘embattled’, as did the Verri brothers. 18. David Bell, ‘Culture and Religion’, in W. Doyle (ed.) Old Regime France (Oxford, 2001), pp. 78 –104, at 79. 19. For a concise account: Israel, Democratic Revolution, pp. 344– 5. 20. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment (Milan, 1764; English trans. Jane Grigson, Oxford, 1996), p. 107. 21. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo, Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna, Pezzo 14, Ragionamento preliminare del Codice Civile della Republlica Italiana (1804). 22. Ibid. 23. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Luosi, Gran Giudice to Eugene, 5 October 1805. 24. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 15, Commissione for Progetto di Metodo Giuridiziario Civile (Chair: Agostino Paravicini) to Luosi, Gran Giudice, 21 June 1805. 25. Renzo Villata, ‘In un Turbino’, pp. 159–214, at 180–1. 26. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 15, Alberto de Simoni to Spannocchi, Min of Justice, 16 September 1803. 27. Pillepich, Alain, ‘Consulat et Re´publique Italienne’, in Bianchi (ed.), La Formazione, pp. 51 –64, at 63–4. 28. Israel, Democratic Revolution, pp. 337–9. 29. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Luosi, Gran Giudice to Eugene, 17 April 1806. 30. Petronio, La Lotta, pp. 316–17. 31. Santini, Lo stato estense, passim. 32. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Luosi, Gran Giudice to Eugene, 24 October 1805. 33. This debate is found in ASM Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Milan – Seduta XX, 15 February 1803. 34. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 49, Commission for the Compliation of the Penal Code to Giuseppe Luosi, Min of Justice. Rilievi alle Osservazioni dei Tribunali e Regii Procuratori sul Progetto del Codice Penale per il Regno d’Italia, (August/September) 1806. 35. Cited in Ferrante, ‘Dans l’Ordre E´tabli’, p. 212. 36. Juan Carlos Gea, Jovellanos o la virtud del ciudadano (Gijo´n, 2011), p. 145.

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NOTES TO PAGES 110 –114

37. On the revolts within the imperial departments: Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 94–122. On the revolts if 1809 in central Italy: Alexander Grab, ‘State power, brigandage and rural resistance in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly 25 (1995), pp. 39–70; Carlo Bullo, ‘Dei movimenti insurrezionali del Veneto sotto il dominio francese, e specialmente del brigantaggio del 1809’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto 15 (1898), pp. 353–69, 441–67, 607–23, 721–45. On the Piacentino: Vittorio Pallavincini, I moti contro Napoleone negli stati di Parma e Piacenza (1805–1806) (Bologna, 1927). 38. A thesis well made in John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 17–65. 39. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Milan, 31 December 1802. 40. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale, October 1806, ‘Osservazioni sul Titolo Primo: Dei delitti Contro la Pubblica Sicurezza’. 41. Antonielli, Prefetti, pp. 375 –411. 42. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, ‘Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale’, October 1806, ‘Osservazioni sul Titolo Primo: Dei delitti Contro la Pubblica Sicurezza’. 43. ASM, Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, unattributed letter to the Commission for the Penal Code, July 1810. 44. Traces of ancien re´gime mentalitie´s were not entirely absent from all the comments which the commissions received at various times. One such came from Cassaziobe, the President of the Appeal Tribunal of the department of the Adda and his public prosecutor, wrote to the commission for the criminal code in 1810, requesting different kinds of prison for people of different social status, as had been the case under the old order. Their letter is referred to in the course of the commission’s deliberations in: ASM, Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17. A certain reticence to punish duelling as severely as did the French Penal Code emerges in these discussions, as well, duelling being largely the prerogative of younger aristocrats: ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Seduta XIII, 28 January, 1803. Article 253 (Duelling). 45. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Seduta XII, 27 January 1803. Articles 238 and 242 (Infanticide). 46. ASM, Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Capitolo XIV: Riabilitazione: ‘un mezzo stabilito a confidenza e con essa l’esercizio di quei diritti che aveva perduta col delitto non ostante l’espiezione della pena’. 47. On the repression if 1809: Laura Valente, ‘La Corte Speciale per i delitti di Stato del Dipartimento del Reno (1809–1811). Interventario Analitico’ (Tesı` di Dottorato, Univ, degli Studi di Bologna, 1973). More widely, Alexander Grab, ‘Army, State and Society: Conscription and Desertion in Napoleonic Italy (1802–1814)’, Journal of Modern History l67 (1995), pp. 25–54. 48. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Seduta VI, 10 March 1803. Article 163 (Death penalty). 49. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, ‘Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale’, October 1806.

NOTES TO PAGES 115 –124

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50. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, ‘Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale’, October 1806. 51. Santini, Lo stato estense, pp. 158–9. 52. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 51, Luosi, Min of Justice to Aldini, 16 February 1810: ‘Appendice alle osservazioni sul titolo II della prima parte del Codice’. 53. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, pp. 338 –9. 54. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 51, Luosi, Min of Justice to Aldini, 16 February 1810. 55. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 51, Aldini to Napoleon, undated (c. April 1810). Rapporto a S M l’Imperatore: Progetto di Codice Penale. 56. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 51, Eugene to Napoleon, 11 April 1810. 57. ASM, Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Milan, 31 December 1802. 58. ASM, Fondi Aldini, 49, Commission for the Compliation of the Penal Code to Giuseppe Luosi, Min of Justice. Rilievi alle Osservazioni dei Tribunali e Regii Procuratori sul Progetto del Codice Penale per il Regno d’Italia, (August/September) 1806. 59. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400– 1900 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 284 –5. Benton points to this in the context of a critique of the work of Carl Schmitt, with reference to Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, 2005). 60. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, p. 285. 61. This is expressed with great force in ASM Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, ‘Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale’, 1806. 62. Renzo Villata, ‘In un Turbino’, pp. 180–2. 63. De Francesco, Antonino, ‘Magistratura’, in L. Mascilli Migliorini (ed.), Italia napoleonica. Dizionario critico (Turin, 2011), pp. 187–8. 64. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica 87, Rapporto del Gran Giudice, Luosi, Min of Justice to Eugene, 11 December 1806. 65. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, ‘Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale’ – Seduta III, 5 March 1803. The commission went as far as to say that, although denunciations were part of ancient Roman practice, Rome as a ‘public spirited’ society. The reality of contemporary Italy was corruption, which made denunciation too dangerous and unreliable. Several of its members expressed doubts that even the publicly sworn procedures of the French in these matters would be assurance enough of reliability, but opinion was divided. 66. The classic study remains: Mona Ozouf, L’honmme re´ge´ne´re´. Essais sur la Re´volution franc
aise (Paris, 1989). 67. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo, Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna, Pezzo 20, Observations sur le Projet de Code de Procedure Civil, undated (c.1803 – 1804 because it still uses republican terminology). A prominent French magistrate, Andre´-Joseph Abrial, was sent to the Italian Republic in 1802 – 3, on an 18-month long mission to inspect all the new tribunals and to advise on the creation of the new codes in the initial stages of discussions. No record of his reports appears to survive. This document may be his commentary, but it is not signed. 68. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo, Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna, Pezzo 20, Observations sur le Projet de Code de Procedure Civil, undated. 69. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, ‘Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale’ – Seduta III, 5 March 1803.

328

NOTES TO PAGES 125 –132

70. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17. Osservzaioni: Capitolo XI ‘Della Deliberazione’, Tribunale di Primera Istanza di Bologna, March 1810. 71. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 86, ‘Osservazioni del Gran Giudice sulla Seconda parte del Progetto di Codice Penale’, 1806. 72. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 21, Pezzo: Codice di Procedura Civile: Sedute pubbliche. Petenti la Dispensa. 73. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 21, Dossier: Codice di Procedura Civile: Sedute pubbliche. Petenti la Dispensa. Luosi, Min of Justice to Regio Prosecutor-General, Court of Appeal, Milan, 22 July 1811. 74. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 21. Rapporto del Presidente Genuchini to Min of Justice, Giustizia Civile: Osservazioni e Dubbi, March 1807. 75. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 21. Dossier: Codice di Procedura Civile: Sedute pubbliche. Petenti la Dispensa. 76. Renzo Villata, ‘In Un Turbino’, p. 200. 77. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Osservzaioni: Capitolo XI ‘Della Deliberazione’, March 1810. 78. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, ‘Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale’ – Seduta VI, 10 March 1803. 79. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 21, Dossier: Codice di Procedura Civile: Sedute pubbliche. Petenti la Dispensa. 80. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, ‘Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale’ – Seduta I, 31 March 1802. 81. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Giustizia Punitiva Parte Moderna Pezzo 17, Osservzaioni: Capitolo XI ‘Della Deliberazione’, Tribunale di Primera Istanza di Bologna, March 1810. 82. ASM, Serie Miscellanea Storica, Pezzo 85, ‘Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale’ – Seduta I, 31 March 1802. 83. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 11. 84. Santini, Lo stato estense, pp. 156–9. 85. Lauren Benton, ‘Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), pp. 563 –88. 86. ASM, Serie Atti di Governo Gistizia Civile Parte Moderna Pezzo 16, Guido Castiglione, Giudice di Milano to the Governor-General, Milan, 15 January 1826.

Chapter 4 Imperial Law on the Marches of Empire: Napoleonic Legal Reforms in Catalonia, 1810 –13 1. The research for this chapter was made possible by the generosity of a British Academy Small Grant in Aid of Research, which financed the work done in the Archivo de la Corun˜a de Arago´n, in Bacelona, in October, 2011, and by the award of a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2011 – 13, for the work carried out in the Archives Nationales de France, Paris. The author wishes to thank both bodies for their invaluable help.

NOTES TO PAGES 133 –142

329

2. On Barcelona: Juan Mercader Riba, Barcelona durante l’occupacio´n Francesca, 1808–1814 (Madrid, 1946). On Girona: Lluis Maria Puig i Oliver, L’annexio´ de Catalunya a Franc
a i el domini napoleo`nic a Girona (Girona, 1976). 3. For the definitive general account of French rule in the region: Joan Mercader i Riba, Catalunya i L’Imperi Napoleo`nic (Monserrat, 1978). On the French territoria reorganisation: idem, ‘Las divisions territoriales napoleonicas de Catalun˜a’, Estudios geogra´ficos 10 (1949), pp. 251 –98. 4. Riba, Catalunya, p. 122. 5. On the Piacentino: Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 156–7. On Roussillon: Michel Brunet, Le Roussillon. Une socie´te´ contre l’E´tat, 1780–1820 (Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1986). 6. Riba, Catalunya, pp. 40–1. 7. Ibid., pp. 51–6. 8. Pedro del Pozo Carrascosa, ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s en Catalun˜a durante la invasio´n napoleo´nica’, in J-M Scholz (ed.), El Tercer Poder. Hacia una comprensio´n histo´rica de la justicia contempora´nea en Espan˜a (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 189– 213, 206– 7. 9. Carrascosa, ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s’, pp. 211 –12. 10. Riba, Catalunya, pp. 56–8. 11. On the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, & Regional Culture in Eighteenth Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, 1986). On the Roman curiali and the oath: Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War against God, 1801–1814 (Abingdon, 2002), pp. 160–1. Up until that point, the French interim authorities, principally through the Piedmontese magistrate Ferdinando Dal Pozzo, had been able to obtain the informal cooperation of many Roman secular magistrates by getting them to serve on advisory bodies as in temporary capacities on the bench, which did not involve taking the oath: Paolo Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie degli ‘Stati Romani’ nel Periodo Napoleonico (1808–1814) (Rome, 1990), pp. 218 –21. 12. Riba, Catalunya, pp. 68–70. 13. Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (first published London, 1908; London, 1996), vol. 3, pp. 37–66. 14. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` son excellence le Mare´chal d’Empire MacDonald, Duc de Tranate, Goveneur Ge´ne´rale de la Catalogne: par le Docteur, Don Thoma Puig, Corregidor du Corregiment de Geronne’, May 1810. Cited in: Lluis Maria de Puig i Oliver, Toma`s Puig: Catalanisme i Afrancesament (Barcelona, 1985) p. 137. 15. Puig i Oliver, Toma`s Puig, p. 140. 16. Ibid., pp. 138–9. 17. Ibid., p. 142. 18. Riba, Catalunya, pp. 113–14. 19. Ibid., pp. 111–13. 20. Ibid., p. 98. 21. Ibid., p. 91. 22. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 276– 7. 23. Riba, Catalunya, pp. 135–42. 24. Nardi, Carla, Napoleone e Roma, la politica della Consulta` Romana (Rome, 1989), passim. 25. Archivo de la Corun˜a de Arago´n Gobierno Francesca (ACA) Caja LX, legajo XXXII, Degerando to Min of Justice, 14 April 1812.

330

NOTES TO PAGES 143 –153

26. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` son excellence le Mare´chal d’Empire MacDonald’, cited in Puig I Oliver, Toma`s Puig, pp. 140– 1. 27. Ibid. 28. Carrascosa: ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s en Catalun˜a’, pp. 195 –6, makes the point that the French tended to stress the defects of the judicial and legal system they found in Catalonia. Carolina Castellano also sees this present in their assessment of what they found in the Kingdom of Naples, but notes that the French usually employed Neapolitan reformers, who had been alienated by the ancien re´gime, to draw up these reports, which fits the example of Puig perfectly: Carolina Castellano, Il mestiere di giudice. Magistrati e sistema giuridico tra i francesi e i Borboni (1799–1848) (Bologna, 2004), p. 34. However, Degerando, although highly critical of what he found in the Girona enclave, was not as sweeping or aggressive in his language as Puig in his May, 1810 report to MacDonald. 29. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation Judiciare, Catalgone) Min of Justice to the Emperor, 6 May 1812. 30. For this view of the guerrilla, as essentially a collapse of law and order into crime driven by desperation: Charles Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventures in Spain, 1808– 1814 (New Haven and London, 2004). 31. For the impact of the blockade on the city: Riba, Barcelona, pp. 132 –47. 32. ACA Caja LX Legajo XXXII, Pedro Cabamox, President, Civil Tribunal, Figueras, to Degerando, 20 April 1812. 33. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Justice, 15 April 1812. 34. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Justice, 19 April 1812. 35. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Justice, 15 June 1812. 36. ACA Caja XXXI Legajo XVIII, Sub-Prefect, Puigcedra` to Prefect, dept Serge, 17 July 1813. 37. ACA Caja XLVI, Legajo XXV, Font y Gauzi to Prefect, dept Ter, 11 June 1812. 38. ACA Caja IX, Legajo VII, Prefect, dept Serge to Degerando, undated (c. January/February 1813). 39. ACA Caja XLV, Legajo XXV, Dossier 3, Petition of Andre Sivatte to Prefect dept Ter et Segre, 24 April 1813. Parez, Proc-Imp, Girona to Prefect, dept Serge, 26 April 1813. 40. Fugier, Andre´, La Junte Supe´rieure des Asturias de l’Invasion franc
aise (Paris, 1930), p. 40. On the character and more general diffusion of this policy: Alan Forrest, ‘The ubiquitous brigand: the politics of the language of repression’, in C. Esdaile (ed.) Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Land Pirates (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 25 –43. 41. A view shared by Carrascosa, ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s en Catalun˜a’, p. 203. 42. Frate, Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 54– 61. 43. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 19 April 1812. 44. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judicaire, Catalgone), Degerando to Min of Justice, 26 April 1812. 45. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judicaire, Catalgone), Souques, deputy for Orle´ans in the Corps Le´gislatif to Min of Justice, undated, 1812. 46. ACA Caja II Bis, legajo III, Degerando to Pelet de la Lorze`re, 26 April 1812. 47. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 23 April 1812.

NOTES TO PAGES 153 –159

331

48. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` son excellence le Mare´chal d’Empire MacDonald, Duc de Tranate, Governor-General de la Catalogne: par le Docteur, Don Thoma Puig, Corregidor du Corregiment de Geronne’, May 1810. Cited in Puig i Oliver, Toma`s Puig, pp. 137–42. 49. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 7 March 1812. 50. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 28 April 1812. This refers to the territories along the North Sea coast of Germany, which were annexed directly to France in 1810. This was an area which contained extensive feudal estates, still protected by mediaeval legislation formulated under the Holy Roman Empire (itself abolished in 1804), where the French had to confront a major challenge to the basis of the Civil Code directly. Degerando’s outlook here indicated the increasing emergence of a collective will among leading imperial servants to forge policies applicable across the Empire, for dismantling all the ancien re´gimes they confronted. The importance of this attitude will be analysed in the conclusion of this chapter. 51. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Justice, 27 April 1812. 52. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Finances, 1 August 1813. 53. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalonge) Degerando to Min of Justice, 27 April 1812. 54. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 245– 56. 55. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 9 April 1812. 56. John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780– 1820 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 182, 243. 57. The case was between a French resident, Ramond Durand, and his Catalan wife, over her adultery: ACA Caja XIV, legajo ix, Dossier 4 and ACA, Audiencı´as, Legajo, 320, carpeta 13, carpeta ‘Sentencias’; Sentencia de la Corte de Apelacio´n, 3 August 1813. This case arose from a milieu that was not really typical of the Catalan elites. The high level of emigration and their general aversion to the French make it impossible to know if Degerando’s predictions had any basis in reality. It seems most unlikely that his conviction that their Catholic culture was a shallow as he believed. 58. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 7 March 1812. 59. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` son excellence le Mare´chal d’Empire MacDonald’, cited in Puig I Oliver, Toma`s Puig, p. 140. 60. ACA Caja I, legajo I, Prefect, dept des Bouches de l’Erbe to Min of the Interior, ‘Rapport Statistque’, 1 March 1813. 61. That is, when Philip V stripped Catalonia of its privileges. 62. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 9 April 1812. 63. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 19 April 1812. 64. Carrascosa, ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s en Catalun˜a’, pp. 195 –6. 65. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 19 April 1812. 66. Ibid. 67. On the Consulate: Emmanuel Berger, La justice pe´nale sous la Re´volution. Les enjeux d’un mode`le judiciare libe´rale (Rennes, 2008). Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution:

332

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

NOTES TO PAGES 159 –167 Violence, Justice and Repression for the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville and London, 2006), pp. 318–24. For a specific regional study in non-French departments: Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773– 1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997), pp. 370–8. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 11 April 1812. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Degerando to Min of Justice, 3 April 1812. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 23 April 1812. For an overview: Michael Broers, ‘L’Impero napoleonico: fra modello e mito’, in B. Mazohi and P. Pombeni (eds), Minoranzi negli imperi. Popoli fra identita` nazionale e ideologia imperiale (Bologna, 2012), pp. 35 –58. For Westphalia: Nicola-Peter Todorov, L’administration du royaume de Westphalie de 1807 a` 1813 (Saarbru¨cken, 2011), pp. 317 –25, 361–7. For this view of the German jurisconsultes: Jacques-Claude Beugnot, Le Grand-Duche´ de Berg (Extrait des memoires ine´dits du Comte Beugnot) (Paris, 1852), pp. 47– 9. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 23 April 1812. Ibid. On Turgot in the wider Enlightenment context of ‘improvement’: Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010), pp. 7–8, 16. ACA Caja II Bis, legajo III, Degerando to Min, Police-General, 19 April 1812. ACA Caja II Bis, legajo III, Degerando to Comte Pelet de la Lorze`re, 26 April 1812. ACA Caja II Bis, legajo III, Comte Pelet de la Lorze`re to Degerando, 20 June 1812. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Min of Justice to Degerando, 29 April 1812. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Min of Justice to Degerando, 5 May 1812. See particularly the correspondence in ANP BB 5 270 (Organisation judiciare, departments hanse´atiques) Prosecutor-General, Cour d’Appel, Lie`ge to Min of Justice, 4 December 1812, on the problems of making the terms of the decree of 9 December 1811 fit local realities. More specifically, Proc-Imp, Tribunal de 1ere Instance, Rees to Min of Justice, 20 March 1812: This area had been part of the Grand Duchy of Berg, where feudal rights had been abolished in 1809; the public prosecutor here actually asked for the application of the decree of 1811 to be applied to his area, to bring it into line with the Hanseatic departments, to avoid lawsuits, while his superior in Liege indicated that feudal conditions in the two areas were not uniform enough to allow this without modifications. ANP BB 5 270 (Organisation judiciare, depts. hanse´atiques) Proc-Imp, Tribunal de 1e`re Instance, Rees to Min of Justice, 22 February 1813. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 28 April 1812. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` son excellence le Mare´chal d’Empire MacDonald’, cited in Puig I Oliver, Toma`s Puig, p. 140. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 11 April 1812. Michel Brunet, Le Roussillon Face a` la Re´volution Franc
aise (Perpinya`, 1989), pp. 38–9. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 14 April 1812. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Degerando to Min of Justice, (no day) April 1812.

NOTES TO PAGES 167 –177

333

89. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 14 April 1812. 90. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Min of Justice to Degerando, 28 May 1812. 91. Frate, Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 65–71. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 115–17. 92. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Intendant of Figueras to Degerando, 26 July 1812. 93. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Procureur-Imperial, Tribunal de 1e`re Instance, Figueras to Degerando, 14 August 1812. 94. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Procureur-Imperial, Tribunal de 1e`re Instance, Figueras to Degerando, 2 August 1812. 95. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, ‘Au nom du Governement de la Catalogne’, c. July– August 1812. 96. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 26 August 1812. 97. On the history of this area under the French: Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1989), pp. 168–237. 98. ACA Caja XXII, legajo XIII, Prefect, dept Serge to Degerando, 31 July 1812. 99. ACA Caja XXII, legajo XIII, Prefect, dept Serge to Degerando, 4 August 1812. 100. ACA Caja XXII, legajo XIII, Degerando to Prefect, dept Serge, 4 August 1812. 101. ACA Caja XXII, legajo XIII, Prefect, dept Serge to Degerando, 10 August 1812. 102. Mercader Riba, Juan, Puigcerda, capital del department del Serge (Barcelona, 1971), pp. 18 – 19. 103. ACA Caja XXII, legajo XIII, Degerando to Prefect, dept Serge, 7 August 1812. 104. ACA Caja LII, legajo XXVIII, Parez to Degerando, 12 September 1812. 105. Jose´ Manuel de BernardoAres, ‘Jurisdiccio´n y Villas de Realengo en la Corona de Castilla’, in E. Martı´ez Ruiz and M. de Pazzis Pi (eds), Instituciones de la Espan˜a Moderna, I, Las Jurisdicciones (Madrid, 1996), pp. 51–71, at pp. 53– 4. 106. See the correspondence in ACA Caja IX, legajo VII. 107. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Arenieoh, avocat, Cour Impe´riale, Montpellier to Min of Justice, undated. 108. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Jaubert, Procureuer-Impe´rial, Tribunal de 1e`re Instance, Perpignan to Min of Justice, undated. 109. ACA Caja XXXV, legajo XX, Degerando to the Governor-General of Catalonia, 8 May 1812. 110. Broers, Napoleonic Empire in Italy, pp. 177– 8. 111. ACA Caja LX, legajo XXXII, Degerando to Procureur-Impe´rial, Tribunal de 1e`re Instance, Girona, 11 April 1813. 112. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Internal Report, Min of Justice to Napoleon, 6 May 1812. 113. Oman, Peninsular War, vol. 7, pp. 81–90. Oman is clear that Suchet knew this distribution of troops was absurd, and that Catalonia should have been abandoned on military grounds. 114. ACA Caja LX, legajo XXXII, Chauvelin to Min of Justice, 21 May 1812. 115. On Andalusia: Jean-Marc Lafon, L’Andalousie et Napole´on. Contre-insurrection, collaboration et re´sistance dans le midi de l’Espagne (1808–1812) (Paris, 2007). On Asturias: Fugier, La Junte Supe´rieure. On Suchet in Valencia: Timothy Gribaudi, ‘Pacification, collaboration and resistance in Napoleonic Valencia, 1812–1813’, unpublished MPhil thesis, Oxford, 2013. 116. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Chauvelin to Min of Justice, 2 June 1812.

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NOTES TO PAGES 177 –187

117. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Chauvelin to Min of Justice, c.spring 1812. 118. ACA Caja XIV, legajo IX, dossier 4, Nadre Lopez to Chauvelin, 8 August 1812. 119. ACA Caja XIV, legajo IX, dossier 4, Verdaquez, Proc-Ge´n., Cour d’Appel to Chauvelin, Indt, 2 August 1812. 120. Such laments abound throughout the series BB 5 (Organisation judiciare) in the Archives Nationales de Paris, for all the imperial departments. 121. ACA Caja XIV, legajo IX, dossier 4, Tomas Puig to Chauvelin, 30 August 1812. 122. ACA Caja XVIII, legajo XI, Degerando to Chauvelin, 7 June 1812. 123. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 15 June 1812. 124. ACA Caja XIII, legajo IX, dossier 1, Melchior de Guardia, President of the Commission for the translation of the Code to Chauvelin, undated, c. November 1812. 125. Riba, Catalunya, p. 236. 126. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Min of Justice to Degerando, 13 May 1812. 127. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, 26 May 1812. 128. Toma`s Puig produced the first Catalan lexicon, while it is no coincidence that Josef Ballot completed and published the first Catalan grammar in 1814, for it had been intended to facilitate its use in official business: Riba, Catalunya, p. 241. 129. Reinhard A. Stauber, ‘The Illyrian Provinces’, in Michael Broers, P. Hicks and A. Guimera´ (eds), The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 241–53, at pp. 244– 5. 130. ANP BB 5 268 (Organisation judiciare, de´partements hanse´atiques) Faure to Min of Justice, 8 May 1811. 131. Brunet, Roussillon, pp. 519–31. 132. Joan Mercader i Riba, Felip V i Catalunya (Barcelona, 1968), pp. 58–9. 133. Riba, Felip V, pp. 50 –1. 134. Joseph’s royal commissioner in Burgos, Francisco Amoro´s, appealed directly to the tradition of loyalty to the Bourbons among the population of Vieja Castilla, in 1809, making direct reference to their support for Philip V, a French monarch, and urged them to link this to the struggle against the partidas: Agustı´n Morel-Fatio, ‘Don Francisco Amoro´s, Marquis de Sotelo. Fondatuer de la gymnastique en France’, Bulletin Hispanique 26 (1924), pp. 209–40, at pp. 228 –32. On the policies of the Josephist regime: Juan Mercader Riba, Jose´ Bonaparte. Rey de Espan˜a, I, 1808–1813. Estratura del Estado Espan˜ol Bonapartista (Madrid, 1983). 135. Riba, Felip V, pp. 427 –9. 136. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min of Justice, undated. 137. Carrascosa: ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s’, pp. 192 –3. 138. ACA Caja XIV, legajo IX, dossier 4, Pierre Aldebert, juge de paix of Barcelona to Chauvelin, 22 April 1812. 139. ACA Caja XIV, legajo IX, dossier 4, Badia to Pierre Aldebert, juge de paix of Barcelona, 12 April 1812. 140. ACA Caja LII, legajo XXVIII, Martin Fallo´ su Esen˜o y Secxet, juge de paix of Hortalrich and Santa Coloma, to Proc-Imp, Girona, 12 April 1813. 141. For the classic account of the repression: Miguel Artola Gallego, Los afrancesados (Madrid, 1953), pp. 229 –50.

NOTES TO PAGES 187 –201

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142. On the last phase of the occupation in Barcelona: Riba, Barcelona, pp. 203 –7. 143. Carrascosa: ‘La introuccio´n del Derecho france´s’, p. 191.

Chapter 5 The Napoleonic Judicial System in the Illyrian Provinces, 1809 –13: An Exercise in Incongruity? 1. The research for this chapter was carried out through the generous support of a British Academy Small Grant in Aid of Research, over March–April, 2010, in the Archives Nationales de Paris. 2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (English trans. London, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 125, 133. 3. Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 1, pp. 131– 2. 4. For a recent analysis of French policy towards Slovenian and Croatian: Reinhard A Stauber, ‘The Illyrian Provinces’, in Michael Broers, P. Hicks and A. Guimera´ (eds), The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 241 –53. 5. For the origins of this term, Jansa Adler: ‘Les Provinces illyriennes dans l’Empire’, in Gene`ve franc
aise 1798–1813 (Geneva, 2004), p. 144, note 21. 6. Adler, ‘Les Provinces illyriennes dans l’Empire’, pp. 139 –67, at pp. 143–4. 7. On Coffinhal’s background: Dictionnaire Historique et Bibliographique de la Re´volution et de l’Empire 1789 – 1815, 2 vols (Paris, 1893, 1897), vol. 2, p. 434. Coffinhal was one of several senior magistrates from the Auvergne region of central France, who emerged as moderate revolutionaries but deeply committed to thorough going reform of the legal system of the old monarchy, and who were employed in the ‘foreign departments’ by Napoleon to organise the new courts. 8. Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (London, 2004), pp. 115–17, 147–8, 157, 177–8. 9. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 21 October 1811. 10. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 8 June 1812. 11. Stuart Woolf, ‘L’administration centrale et le de´veloppement de l’urbanisme a` l’e´poque napole´onienne’, Collection de l’E´cole Franc
aise de Rome 96/i (1987), pp. 25 –34. 12. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 7 October 1811. 13. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 29 July 1811. For the similar opinion of the Governor-General: ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Governor-General to Min of Justice, 16 August 1811. 14. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Governor-General to Min of Justice, 16 August 1811. 15. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 10 September 1812. 16. Angelo de Benvenuti, Storia di Zara dal 1797 al 1918 (Rome and Milan, 1953), p. 50. 17. ANP F 1e 61 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Chabrol, Intendant-General to Min of Interior, 10 April 1813. 18. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Governor-General to Min of Justice, 15 March 1812.

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19. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 15 Feburary 1812. He also noted that not all maires were literate in rural areas, even if drawn from relatively wealthy peasants. 20. ANP F 1e 61 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Chabrol, Intendant-General to Min of Interior, 29 April 1813. 21. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Chabrol, Intendant-General to Indt, Croatia, 12 May 1813. 22. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Indt, Dalmatia to Min of Interior, 1 January 1813. 23. For a penetrating analysis of this: Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003), pp. 180– 6, 238–44. 24. Alder, ‘Provinces illyriennes’, p. 144. 25. Ibid., pp. 160–1. 26. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Illyria) Governor-General to Min of Justice, 1 April 1812. 27. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Intendant, Prov Ragusa to Intendant-General, 1 March 1813. 28. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 21 October 1811. 29. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 15 February 1812. 30. Cited in Tullio Erber, Storia della Dalmazia dal 1797 al 1814, 2 vols (first published Milan and Rome, 1886–1892). Republished in Atti e Memore della Societa` Dalmata di Storia Patria 18/ii (Venice, 1990), pp. 305– 6. 31. Erber, Storia, vol. 2, pp. 305–6. 32. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Min of Justice to Coffinhal, undated c. March 1812. 33. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Rapport, Min of Justice to the Emperor, May 1812. 34. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 15 February 1812. 35. ANP BB 5 287 (Organisation judiciare, Catalogne) Degerando to Min de la Justice, 9 April 1812. 36. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Proc-Imp, Cour d’Appel, Laybach to Min of Justice, 10 January 1812. 37. This issue dominates much of the correspondence in ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes). 38. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 12 December 1812. 39. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 29 July 1811. 40. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 31 July 1811. 41. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Rapport, Min of Justice to the Emperor, May 1812. 42. ANP F 1e 61 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Gen. Bertrand, Governor-General, Provinces illyriennes to Min of Interior, 13 December 1811. 43. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 31 July 1811.

NOTES TO PAGES 208 –214

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44. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 18 December 1812. 45. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 18 December 1812. 46. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 27 April 1811. 47. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 5 September 1812. 48. Cited in Erber, Storia, vol. 2, p. 305. 49. Even the commission of senior magistrates set up to frame a new penal code for the Republic of Italy regarded duelling as ‘courageous and honourable’ and reiterated these vies several times in its discussions: ASM Protocollo delle Sessioni della Commissione Incaricata dell’Esame del Codice Penale, Milan, 31 December 1802. 50. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Bayamonti, President, Court of Appeal, Ragusa to Min of Justice, 27 July 1812. For similar attitudes among the Venetian magistracy in the Kingdom of Italy, see the correspondence from local magistrates in the Venetian departments, who were concerned about placing upperclass offenders in the same prisons as common criminals, and their arguments for the use of house arrest for such people in Archivio di Stato di Milano (AMS) Fondi Aldini, 49. 51. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 5 August 1812. Min of Justice to Bayamonti, President, Cour d’Appel, Ragusa, 16 September 1812. 52. On these revolts in north-eastern Italy: Carlo Bullo, ‘Dei movimenti insurrezionali del Veneto sotto il dominio francese, e specialmente del brigantaggio del 1809’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto 15 (1898), pp. 353– 69, 441–67, 607–23, 721–45. 53. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Commissaire-General de Police, Laybach to Commissaire-General of Justice, 28 April 1811. 54. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 31 May 1811. 55. All major works on the Illyrian Provinces treat violent disorder at length. The most significant for Dalmatia are: Pasquale Pisani, La Dalmatie de 1797 a` 1814 (Paris, 1893), and the less partisan G. Cassi, ‘Les populations Juliennes-illyriennes pendant la domination napole´onienne (1806 – 1814)’, Re´vue des E´tudes Napole´on, 19 (1930), pp. 193 – 212. More modern studies, which cover all of the provinces are: Maria Senowska-Gluck, ‘Pouvoir et socie´te´ en Illyrie napole´onienne’, Re´vue de l’Institut Napole´on, 136 (1980), pp. 57 – 78 and idem, ‘Illyrie sous la domination napoleonienne’, Acta Polonia Historica, 41 (1980), pp. 99 – 121, both of which emphasise economic problems and social structures. 56. For example the notorious near collapse of the prosecution of the Nazole bandit-smugglers in the Piedmontese departments: Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997), pp. 373–6. 57. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 21 July 1811. 58. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Rapport to Min of Justice, c. 1811 undated. 59. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 27 April 1811.

338

NOTES TO PAGES 214 –229

60. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Rapport, internal to Min of Justice, May 1811. 61. ANP BB 5 295 (Organisation judiciare, Provinces illyriennes) Rapport, Min of Justice to the Emperor, May 1812. See also Eber, Storia, vol. 2, p. 305, for the identical fears of de la Bergerie, the Intendant of Province Zara in 1812. 62. Erber, Storia, vol. 2, pp. 304–305. 63. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Chabrol, Intendant-General to Min of Interior, 10 September 1810. 64. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Intendant of Civil Croatia to Intendant-General, 16 February 1813. 65. ANP F 1e 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Intendant of Carinthia to Intendant-General, undated. 66. Erber, Storia, vol. 1, pp. 95–6. 67. ANP F 1e Ge´ne´rale, 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Intendant, Civil Croatia to Intendant-General, 16 February 1813. ANP F 1e Ge´ne´rale, 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes Intendant, Civil Croatia to Intendant-General, 16 February 1813. 68. ANP F 1e Ge´ne´rale, 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes Intendant, Ragusa, to Intendant-General, 1 March 1813. 69. ANP F 1e 61 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Charbol, Intendant-General to Min of Interior, 10 April 1812. 70. ANP F 1e Ge´ne´rale, 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes) Intendant, Dalmatia to Intendant-General, 1 January 1813. 71. For an excellent analysis and critical survey of this: Anna Maria Rao, ‘The Feudal Question in the Kingdom of Naples’, Napoleonic Empire, pp. 227– 40. 72. ANP F 1e Ge´ne´rale, 62 (Administration Ge´ne´rale, Pays re´unis et conquis, Provinces illyriennes Intendant, Ragusa to Intendant-General, 1 March 1813. 73. Erber, Storia, vol. 1, pp. 66–71. 74. Every study of the Illyrian Provinces has, rationally, devoted significant attention to conscription and the disorder surrounding it. The most detailed remains Pisani, La Dalmatie, passim. 75. Stauber, ‘Illyrian Provinces’, pp. 249– 50.

Chapter 6 Ferdinando Dal Pozzo: A Piedmontese Notable at the Heart of Napoleonic Europe, 1800 –14 1. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 28 prairial, an ix. 2. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Jourde to Bigot Pre´meau, 11 prairial, an xiii. 3. A similar role for western Piedmont, principally for posts in the new department of the Stura, embracing the old provinces of Cuneo, Mondovı`, Alba, Saluzzo and Savigliano, seems to have been played by Francesco Rocca, a patriot with a similar background to Dal Pozzo’s in the lower levels of the Senate. See his letter of recommendation in ANP BB 5 310 (Organisation judiciare, dept Po). 4. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 29 messidor, an xi.

NOTES TO PAGES 230 –242

339

5. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 27 messidor, an xi. 6. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 28 prairial, an ix. 7. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 29 messidor, an xi. 8. ANP BB 18 634 (Affaires Criminelles, dept Po) Menou to Min of Justice – 15 flore´al, an xi/15 May 1803. 9. ANP BB 18 494 (Affaires Criminelles, dept Marengo) Delaistre to Min of Justice, 1 nivoˆse, an xiii/. 10. Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy 1773–1821 (Lampeter, Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), pp. 313–449. 11. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 28 fructidor, an xi/. 12. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, Tableau Ge´ne´ral, an x. 13. See the numerous examples of individual appointments throughout ANP BB 5 255–67 (Organisation judiciare, Rhin). 14. See Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 301 –3. 15. ANP BB 5 311 (Organisation judiciare, dept Sesie) Peyretti di Condove, First President, Court of Appeal, Turin to Min of Justice, 18 January 1810. 16. ANP BB 5 311 (Organisation judiciare, dept Sesie) Tixier to Min of Justice, 15 January 1810. 17. ANP BB 5 311 (Organisation judiciare, dept Sesie) Cotta to Min of Justice, 10 January 1810. 18. Ibid. 19. Almanach Impe´riale, 1802– 1808. 20. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Dal Pozzo to Bigot Pre´meau, Councillor of State, 21 May 1805. 21. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Botton di Castellemonte, First President, Court of Appeal, Turin to Min of Justice, 10, messidor, an x. 22. ANP BB 5 319 (Organisation judiciare, dept Arno) Botton to Min of Justice, 11 August 1808. 23. ANP BB 5 319 (Organisation judiciare, dept Arno) Montiglio to Min of Justice, 18 January 1809. 24. ANP BB 5 (319) (Organisation judiciare, dept Arno) ‘Liste des sujets d’Elite parmi les candidates indique´s par les Procureurs Ge´ne´raux des Cours d’Appel pour les places du Ministre Public dans les Cours d’Appel et Cours de Justice Criminelle du pays de Florence’, February 1808. 25. Adolphe Cheruel, Dictionnaire des Institutions de la France (Paris, 1929), p. 718. 26. Paolo Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie degli ‘Stati Romani’ nel Periodo Napoleonico (1808–1814) (Rome, 1990), pp. 261 –8. 27. Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 54 –7. 28. Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War against God, 1801– 1814 (London, 2002), pp. 146–74. 29. ANP F 19 1925 (Cultes, Concile Nationale, 1811), ‘A´ la perpetuelle memoire de lachose’, 10 June 1809. 30. ANP F 7 8893 (Police-General, Rome) Norvins, Directuer-Ge´ne´ral de Police, Rome to Min 3 arrond., Police-General, 29 July 1811.

340

NOTES TO PAGES 243 –250

31. ANP BB 18 700 (Affaires Criminelles, Cour Impe´riale, Rome) Min of Justice to then Emperor, 31 October 1811. 32. ANP BB 18 700 (Affaires Criminelles, Cour Impe´riale, Rome) Legonidec to Min of Justice, 16 July 1811. 33. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Dal Pozzo to Min of Justice, 24 June 1811. 34. Cited in Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 84–5. 35. Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, p. 86. 36. Ibid., p. 90. 37. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated, 1810. 38. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated, 1810. Also cited in Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, p. 89. 39. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated, 1810. Also cited in Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, p. 92. 40. ANP BB 5 314 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) Proc. Court of Appeal, Rome to Min of Justice, 29 July 1811. 41. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated (1810). 42. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated (1810). 43. ANP BB 18 700 (Affaires Criminelles, dept Rome) Proc. Crim. Court to Min of Justice, 13 February 1810. 44. This influential concept was first used extensively in the context of early modern Scotland in Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470 – 1625 (Edinburgh, 1991). 45. ANP BB 18 700 (Affaires Criminelle, dept Rome) Min of Justice to Proc. Crim. Court, 19 March 1810. 46. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, department Rome) Proc. Court of Appeal to Min of Justice, 1 October 1810. 47. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated (1810). Cited in Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 104–5. 48. Alvazzi del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, p. 107. 49. ANP BB 5 314 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Compte analytique rendu par M. Dal Pozzo au Consulte’, 31 December 1810. 50. ANP BB 5 304 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 7 messidor, an ix. 51. ANP BB 5 313 (dept Rome, Organisation judiciare) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated (1810). Cited in Alvazzi Del Frate, Le Istituzioni Giudiziarie, pp. 121–2. 52. ANP BB 5 314 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) Anon to Min of Justice, undated (c. August 1809). 53. ANP BB 5 314 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) Coffinhal to Min of Justice, 9 November 1809. 54. Jacques Moulard (ed.), Lettres ine´dites du Comte de Tournon, pre´fet de Rome, 2 vols (Paris, 1914), vol. 1, p. 11.

NOTES TO PAGES 251 – 258

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55. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) Proc. Court of Appeal to Min of Justice, 30 September 1811. 56. ANP BB 5 313 (Organisation judiciare, dept Rome) ‘Rapport sur l’organisation judiciare des e´tats romains’, Coffinhal to Min of Justice, undated (1810). 57. ANP BB 5 298 (Organisation judiciare, dept Geˆnes) La Grave, Prosecutor-General, Court of Appeal, Genoa to Min of Justice, 18 September 1810. 58. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Dal Pozzo to Min of Justice, 24 June 1811 (from Florence). 59. ANP BB 5 299 (Organisation judiciare, dept Geˆnes), Dal Pozzo, 1 President, Imperial Court, Genoa to Min of Justice, 7 March 1813. 60. ANP BB 5 298 (Organisation judiciare, dept Geˆnes) La Grave, Prosecutor-General, Court of Appeal, Genoa to Min of Justice, 20 September 1810. 61. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, dept Geˆnes) Prefect, dept Geˆnes to Min of Justice, 11 March 1811. 62. ANP BB 5 300 (Organisation judiciare, dept Montenotte) Prefect, dept Montenotte to Min of Justice, 10 March 1811. 63. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Lebrun to Min of Justice – 1 jour comple´mentaire, year xiii/18 September 1805. 64. ANP BB 5 300 (Organisation judiciare, dept Montenotte) De Simon, Proc-Imp, Civil Trib, Savona to Min of Justice, 9 March 1806. 65. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Bigot-Premeaux, Conseiller de’E´tat, from Genoa to Min of Justice, 17 messidor, an xiii. 66. ANP BB 5 298 (Organisation judiciare, dept Geˆnes) La Grave, Prosecutor-General, Court of Appeal, Genoa to Min of Justice, 18 September 1810. 67. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Dal Pozzo to Min of Justice, April 1812. 68. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Costa, Senator and deputy to Corps Le´gislatif to Min of Justice, 13 October 1810. 69. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) De Gregory de Marcorengo, Senator (for Pied dept) to Min of Justice, 6 April 1811. 70. ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) Dal Pozzo, 1er Pres, Civil Trib, Vercelli to Min of Justice, 15 July 1813. La Grave appointed a different Auditeur to the post, a Piedmontese: ANP BB 5 296 (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Geˆnes) La Grave, Prosecutor-General, Imperial Court, Genoa, to Min of Justice, 12 July 1813. 71. This is not to say that the monarchy did not admit modifications to its own legislation. There were important changes to criminal law, notably the abolition of torture, and changes to the territorial distribution of the courts. The French Civil and Commercial Codes were retained for Liguria, and a Royal Commission was created in 1816 to reform many legal statutes. No member of the Napoleonic magistracy sat on the commission, however, and its recommendations did not reflect the French reforms: M.B. Bertini – M.P. Niccolini, L’ordinamento giuridiziario durante la Restaurazione, in Archivio di Stato di Torino (ed.), Ombre e Luci della Restaurazione, Archivio di Stato di Torino, Rome 1997, pp. 120 –34. 72. Alessandro Aspesi, La Restaurazione in Piemonte (Turin, 1960), pp. 41–8. 73. On the wider context of the debates on judicial reform, 1814 – 21: I. Soffietti, ‘Sulla storia dei principi dell’oralita` del contraddittorio e della pubblicita` nel procedimento penale. Il periodo della Restaurazione nel Regno di Sardegna’, Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano 64 (1971 – 2), pp. 125 – 241. On Dal Pozzo: Romagnani, Balbo, vol. 2, pp. 613 – 14.

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74. Luigi Bollea, F. Dal Pozzo di Castellino, 1768 – 1843 (Turin, 1906), pp. 196 – 201. 75. Gian Paolo Romagnani, Balbo, vol. 2, pp. 613– 14. 76. Gabriele Clemens, Integrazione imperial e progessione di carriera: la politica napoleonica per in funzionari dei territori annessi, in M. Bellabarba, B. Mazohl, R. Sauber and M. Verga (eds), Gli imperi dopi l’Impero nell’Europa del XIX secolo (Bologna, 2008), pp. 464–5. 77. Dictonnaire Historique et Bibliographique de la Re´voltion et de l’Empire, 1789– 1815, 2 vols (Paris, 1937), vol. 1, p. 183. 78. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (New York, 1977), pp. 648–9.

Chapter 7 Cultural Imperialism in a European Context?: Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy 1. Sidney Pollard, The Integration of the European Economy since 1815 (London, 1981), p. 24. See also E.V. Tarle, La vita economica dell’Italia nell’eta` Napoleonica (Turin, 1950). 2. Classic studies of anti-Napoleonic sentiment among the giacobini include: Delio Cantimori and Renzo De Felice (eds), Giacobini italiani, 2 vols (Bari, 1956–64), for their writings; A. Saitta, ‘La questioned el “giacobinismo” italiano’, Criticas torica 1/v (1965); Giorgio Vaccarino, I patriotti anarchistes’ e l’idea dell’unita italiana, 1796–1799 (Turin, 1955); Giorgio Vaccarino, ‘Crisi giacobinie cospirazionea ntifrancese nell’anno vii in Piemonte’, Occidente 11/ii (1952). For an excellent analysis of Franco-Italian tensions among the giacobini, see Anna Maria Rao, Esuli: l’emigrazionepo ltica italiana in Francia (1792–1802) (Bologna, 1996). 3. For an overview, see Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon (London, 1996). For France, see Isser Woloch, ‘Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society’, Past and Present 111/i (1986), pp. 101–29; Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1988). On northern Italy, see Alexander Grab, ‘Army, State and Society: Conscription and Desertion in Napoleonic Italy (1802–1814)’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), pp. 25–54; Alexander Grab, ‘State Power, Brigandage and Rural Resistance in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quart. 25 (1995), pp. 39–70; Michael Broers, ‘Policing Piedmont: The “Well Ordered Police State” in the Age of Revolution, 1794–1821’, Criminal Justice History 15 (1994), pp. 39–57. For an overview in English, see Michael Broers, ‘The Police and the Padroni: Italian Notabili, French Gendarmes and the Origins of the Centralized State in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quart. 26 (1996), pp. 331–53. 4. Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (London, 1995), p. 96. 5. That is, the provinces of Piedmont: the County of Nice and the Duchy of Savoy were annexed in 1792; the island of Sardinia never came under French rule. 6. Apart from the Legations and the Marches, which were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1805 and 1809 respectively. 7. For an overview of the concept of ‘the other’ in a French context, see Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: la re´flexion francaise sur la diversite´ humaine (Paris, 1989). 8. See Frederic Bluche, Le Bonapartisme: aux origines de la droite autoritaire (1800–1850) (Paris, 1980), for a seminal study of the relationship and distinctiveness of ralliement and amalgame. 9. This is the thesis of Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789– 1820s (New York, 1994). On the acceptability of the Civil Code within the legal classes, see Jean-Louis Halperin, L’Impossible Code Civil (Paris, 1992).

NOTES TO PAGES 263 –266

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10. See Nathan Wachtel, ‘Acculturation’, in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (eds), Faire de l’histoire (Paris, 1974), pp. 130–1. 11. On the imperial departments, see Broers, ‘The Police and the Padroni’. On the concept of the ‘security state’ in France in this period, see H.G. Brown, ‘Domestic State Violence: Repression from the Croquants to the Commune’, Journal of History 42/iii (1999), pp. 597 – 622. In a wider context, see Michael Broers, ‘Napoleon, Charlemagne and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe’, Journal of History 44 (2001), pp. 135 – 54. 12. Livio Antonielli, I Prefetti dell’Italia napoleonica: Repubblica e Regno d’Italia (Bologna, 1983), pp. 67 –8. 13. Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford, 1998). 14. See Antonielli, I Prefetti, pp. 305 – 28, on the ultimate impossibility of assimilating Venetian aristocrats into the prefectorial corps of the Kingdom of Italy. 15. Stuart Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past and Present 124 (1989), pp. 96–120. 16. A century later, in West Africa, the French alternated between a ‘hardline’, radical republican policy of cultural domination and an approach based on cooperation with local elites, shifting with the political tide within metropolitan France: Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997). The First Empire in effect attempted both simultaneously. 17. For a penetrating recent study, see Henry Laurens, L’Expedition d’Egypte, 1798–1801 (Paris, 1997). 18. For an overview, see Michael Broers, ‘The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the CounterRevolution in Italy’, Renaissance and Mod. Studies 23 (1989), pp. 159–73. 19. On French dealings with the Italians, see Rao, Esuli. For dealings with the Irish, see Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982); Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven, 1989). On Germany, historians of all shades and of none admit this tension: see T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792– 1802 (Oxford, 1983); T.C.W. Blanning, ‘German Jacobins and the French Revolution’, Journal of History 23 (1980); Heinrich Scheel, Su¨ddeutsche Jakobiner: Klassenka¨mpfe und republikanische Bestrebungen im deutschen Su¨den Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1962). On the Netherlands, see Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York, 1977). 20. See Mona Ozouf, ‘L’Invention de l’ethnographie franc
aise: le questionnaire de l’Acade´mie Celtique’, in her L’Ecole de la France: essais sur la Re´volution, I’ utopia et l’enseignement (Paris, 1984), 349–79; Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity’, p. 103. For an analysis of this concept of history and its centrality to the French conquest of Egypt, see Laurens, L’Expedition d’ Egypte, pp. 24–6. 21. ANP AF IV 1047, Cultes, 1810–11, dossier II, ‘Le Discours de S.M. l’Empereur et Roi au Corps Legislatif, 1810’. 22. ANP BB 18 700, Affaires Criminelles, department Rome, Min of Justice, ‘Rapporta S.M’, 29 October 1811. 23. ANP AF IV 1045, Minister of Religious Affairs to Napoleon, 2 August 1804. 24. For Degerando on Trent, see ANP F 20 102, Statistique, de´partement Rome, 1810. 25. See especially ‘Rome, capital napole´onienne’, in Villes et territoire pendant la periode napole´onienne: France et Italie: actes du colloque, Rome, 3, 4 et 5 mai 1984 (Rome, 1987). See also Ronald T. Ridley, The Eagle and the Spade: The Archaeology of Rome during the Napoleonic Era, 1809–1814 (Cambridge, 1992).

344

NOTES TO PAGES 266 –271

26. Luigi Zangheri, ‘Firenze e la Toscana nel periodo napoleonico’, in Villes et territoire, pp. 320 –1. 27. Carlo Pietrangeli, ‘Un’ambaciatore d’eccezione: Canova a Parigi’, in C. Bernini (ed.), Antonio Canova (Venice, 1992), pp. 15–22. 28. Pierre-Louis Roederer, Me´moire pour servir a` l’histoire de la socie´te´ polie en France (Paris, 1835), pp. 37–43, on the corrupting political influence of the Medicis, and 149–53, on the corrupting influence of the Italian language on French conversation and as an agent in debasing aristocratic morals under Henri III. 29. Ibid., pp. 422–3. 30. Ibid., pp. 21, 49. 31. ANP BB 5 304, (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Turin) Jourde to Min of Justice, 18 July 1801. 32. Jacques Moulard (ed.), Lettres inedites du comte Camille de Tournon, prefet de Rome, 1809– 1814: 1re partie: La politique et l’esprit public (Paris, 1914), Tournon to his mother, 3 November 1810. 33. Ibid., Tournon to his father, 11 February 1810. 34. Ibid., Tournon to his father, 19 March 1810. 35. ANP F 7 8899, (Police-General, de´partement Rome) Director-General, Rome to minister of 3rd arrondissement police, 20 September 1812. 36. ANP F 7 7018 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police department Rome) DirectorDeneral of Rome to Minister, Police-General, 23 February 1811. 37. For a summation as well as an analysis of the views of Voltaire, Buffon, De Pauw and Bougainevilliers, see Miche`le Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au sie`cle des Lumie`res (Paris, 1971). 38. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 35 –8, 102– 7. 39. ANP Fonds Archives Prive´es, 29 (Fonds Roederer), 16, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 3 December 1811. 40. ANP F 7 8795 (Police-General, department Apennines) Prefect dept Apennines to Director-General, Turin, 12 October 1812. 41. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral Florence to Minister, Police-General, 26 December 1812. 42. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs- Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 4 November 1812. 43. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister Police-General, 3 March 1813. 44. Giorgio Vaccarino, ‘Ugo Vicenso Botton di Castellamento: l’e sperienza giacobina di un illuminista piemontese’, Bolletino storico bibilografico subalpino 40/iii (1965). 45. See especially Gian Paolo Romagnani, Prospero Balbo: intellettuale e uomo di stato, 1762– 1837, 2 vols (Turin, 1988–90), vol. 2. 46. Within Piedmont, see Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773– 1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997). 47. ANP Archives Prive´es, 29 (Fonds Roederer), 16, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 16 November 1812. 48. ANP BB 5 314, (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Rome) Ferdinando Dal Pozzo to Min of Justice, 9 September 1809. 49. ANP BB 5 314, (Organisation judiciare, Cour de Rome) Min of Justice to Napoleon, 25 August 1809.

NOTES TO PAGES 272 –277

345

50. ANP AF IV 1071, ‘Aperc
u politique sur la situation actuelle de la Toscane’, addressed to Minister of Interior, 24 August 1802. 51. Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity’, pp. 111–12. 52. ANP F 7 8867 (Police-General, department Ombronne) Prefect, dept Ombronne to Minister, 3rd arrondissement Police-General, 15 July 1810. 53. On the dramatic failure and unpopularity of the reforms of Pistoia in Tuscany, see Carlo Fantappie`, Riforme ecclesiastiche e resistenzaso ciali: la sperimentazione istituzionale nella diocesid i Prato alla fine dell’antico regime (Bologna, 1986). On the widespread resistance to the secular reforms, see Bernardo Sordi, L’amministrazione illuminata: riforme delle comunita` e progetti di dostituzione nella Toscana leopoldina (Milan, 1991). On the popular risings, see Gabriele Turi, ‘Viva Maria’: la reazione alle riforme leopoldine, 1790 – 1799 (Florence, 1969). 54. ANP F 19 1072A (Cultes, Police des Cultes, Italie) Minister, Police-General to Minister of Religious Affairs, 18 January 1810. 55. ANP F 7 8805 (Police-General, Toscane) Director-General, Florence to Minister, 3rd arrondissement Police-General, 30 April 1813. 56. ANP F 20 102 (Statistique, de´partement Rome) ‘Rapport sur Rome et les E´tats Romains, 1810’. 57. ANP F 7 7018 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Rome) Director-General, Rome to Minister, Police-General, 26 October 1813. 58. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General Florence to Minister, Police-General, 23 January 1813. 59. ANP Fle 85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´uinis, Parme et Plaisance) Administrative Prefect to Minister of Interior, 1 March 1806. 60. Archivio di Stato, Cuneo, Epoca Francese, mazzo 227, Commandant of Sture department to Inspector-General of National Gendarmerie, 5 July 1803. 61. I am deeply grateful to Ettore Dezza of the Faculty of Law, Univerista` degli Studi, Piacenza, for telling me of an oral tradition that recounts the marriages of three French gendarmes in this way in Borgo di Taro, about 1810. 62. ANP F 7 8794 (Police-General, department Apennines) Director-General, Turin to Minister, 3rd arrondissement police, 5 June 1810. 63. Lettres ine´dites, ed. Moulard, Tournon to his mother, 23 September 1810. 64. Ibid., Tournon to his mother, 6 May 1810. 65. ANP F 20 102 (Statistique, department Rome) ‘Rapport sur Rome et les E´tats Romains, 1810’. 66. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 21 March 1812. 67. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister of Police-General, 12 February 1812. 68. James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford, 1982), p. 307. 69. Ferdinand Boyer, ‘Un Oncle de Cavour: le Chevalier d’Auzers’, Re´vue de l’Institut Napole´on, 72 (1959), pp. 118– 24. 70. ANP Fle 85, Pays Annexe´s et Re´uinis, Parme et Plaisance, Nardon to Minister of the Interior, 10 September 1806. 71. Lettres ine´dites, ed. Moulard, Tournon to Minister of the Interior, 27 May 1810. 72. ANP F 7 7018 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Rome) Director-General, Rome to Minister, Police-General, 21 May 1812.

346

NOTES TO PAGES 277 –283

73. ANP F 7 7018 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Rome) Director-General, Rome to Minister, Police-General, 11 April 1812. 74. ANP F 20 102 (Statistique, de´partement Rome) ‘Rapport sur Rome et les E´tats Romains, 1810’. 75. Ibid. 76. Georges Berlia, Ge´rando, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1942). 77. ANP F 20 102 (Statistique, de´partement Rome) ‘Rapport sur Rome et les E´tats Romains, 1810’. 78. Ibid. 79. ANP Fle 85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´uinis, Parme et Plaisance) Administrative Prefect to Minister of the Interior, 20 September 1806. 80. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 12 November 1813. 81. ANP F 7 7017 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Geˆnes) CommissionerGeneral, Genoa to Camillo Borghese, 12 July 1808. 82. Lettres ine´dites, ed. Moulard, Tournon to his father, 11 February 1810. 83. Said, Orientalism, pp. 38–40. 84. Lettres ine´dites, ed. Moulard, Tournon to his mother, 1 April 1810. 85. Ibid., Tournon to his father, 11 February 1810. 86. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral Florence to Minister, Police-General, 15 February 1813. 87. ANP Fle85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´unis, Parme et Plaisance) Administrative Prefect to Minister of the Interior, 10 September 1806. 88. ANP Archives Prive´es, 29 (Fonds Roederer), 16, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 30 March 1812. 89. See Romagnani, Prospero Balbo; Ferdinand Boyer, ‘La Famille de Cavour et le re´gime napole´onien’, Re´vue historique, 85 (1939); Rosario Romeo, Cavoure il suo tempo, 3 vols (Bari and Rome, 1969–84), Vol. 1, p. i. 90. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 22 January 1813. 91. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 21 March 1812. 92. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 21 March 1812. 93. It even reached Lagarde in Florence, who noted that the economic collapse of the city predisposed the French in Genoa to believe in constant plots against them. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 3 March 1812. 94. For examples of these letters, all of which escaped the authorities in Liguria, see Coscritti e disertori del dipartimento di Montenotte: lettere ai familiari, 1806–1814, ed. Danilo Presotto (Savona, 1990). 95. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) Director-General, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 25 October 1813. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996). 96. Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 370–1. 97. [Ferdinando Dal Pozzo ], Opuscoli di un avvocato milanese originario piemontese sopra varie quistioni politicolegali, 7 vols (Milan, 1817–19). 98. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 28 October 1813.

NOTES TO PAGES 283 –287

347

99. R.J. Rath, The Fall of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (New York, 1941). 100. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 12 November 1813. 101. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind, pp. 294–308. 102. Ronald Robinson, ‘Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 12/ii (1984), p. 49. I am deeply indebted to my former colleague Andrew Thompson for bringing this stimulating piece to my attention. 103. On the auditeurs, see Charles Durand, Les Auditeurs au Conseil d’E´tat de 1803 a` 1814 (Paris, 1958). On the impact of this policy on a Piedmontese noble family, see Massimo d’Azeglio, I Miei ricordi, 2 vols (Florence, 1867), vol. 2, pp. 154 –79. 104. On the Netherlands, see Schama, Patriots and Liberators. On Spain, see Juan Mercader Riba, Barcelona durante la ocupacio´n francesca, 1808–1814 (Madrid, 1946); Miguel Artola, Los afrancesados (Madrid, 1953); Miguel Artola, Los origenes de la Espan˜a contemporan˜a, 2 vols (Madrid, 1959). 105. Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity’, p. 112. 106. On the origins of these attitudes, see Alison Patrick, ‘The Approach of the Revolutionary Officials to Social Problems’, Australian Journal of French Studies 18 (1981), pp. 248–63. On the ethnographic interests of the first prefects in France, see Marie-Noe¨lle Bourguet, De´chiffrer la France: la statistique de´partementale a` l’e´poque napole´onienne (Paris, 1988). See also Woolf, ‘French Civilization and Ethnicity’, pp. 100–103. 107. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind, p. 302. 108. See Axtell, The European and the Indian. 109. Max Tacel, ‘L’Agitation royaliste a` Turin de 1805 a` 1808’, Re´vue de l’Institut Napole´on 116 (1954). 110. ANP F 7 7016 (Bulletins des Directeurs-Ge´ne´raux de Police, Florence) DirectorGeneral, Florence to Minister, Police-General, 17 March 1813. 111. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind, p. 54. 112. ANP Archives Prive´es, 29 (Fonds Roederer), 15, Mme Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, n.d., c. December 1812.

Chapter 8 Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800 –14 1. Georges Carrot, ‘Gardes d’honneur’, in J. Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napole´on (Paris, 1989), p. 779. 2. On ralliement: Fre´de´ric Bluche, Le Bonaparteisme: aux origines de la droite autoritaire, 1800 – 1850 (Paris, 1980). On society: Louis Bergeron and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les masses de granit: cent mille notables du Premier Empire (Paris, 1979). 3. Euge`ne Bucquoy, Les gardes d’honneur du Premier Empire (Paris, 1908), pp. 86–112. 4. Umbria, part of the Papal States, annexed to France, 1809–14. 5. Pierre-Louis Roederer (1754–1835), an influential imperial administrator. 6. ANP Archives Prive´es, Fondes Roederer 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 28 April 1813. 7. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 11 June 1813. 8. In general: Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–1830 (London, 1982); Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The French Army and Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1989). On France: I. Woloch, ‘Napoleonic Conscription:

348

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

NOTES TO PAGES 287 –290 State Power and Civil Society’, Past & Present 111 (1986), pp. 101 –29. On the Kingdom of Italy: Alexander Grab, ‘Army, State and Society: Conscription and Desertion in Napoleonic Italy (1802–1814)’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), pp. 25 –54; idem, ‘State Power, Brigandage and Rural Resistance in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly 25 (1995), pp. 39 –70; Livio Antonielli, I prefetti dell’Italia napoleonica (Milan, 1983). On Piedmont: Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy 1773– 1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997), pp. 313 –50. On the de´partements re´unis: idem, ‘The Police and the Padroni: Italian Notabili, French Gendarmes and the Origins of the Centralized State in Napoleonic Italy’, European History Quarterly 26 (1996), pp. 331–54. On the Veneto: Carlo Bullo, ‘Dei movimenti insurrezionali del Veneto sotto il dominio napoleonico, e specialmente del brigantaggio politico del 1809’, Nuovo archivio Veneto 17 (1899), pp. 66–101. For its decline in Siena: O. di Simplicio, Peccato, penitenza, perdono: Siena, 1575–1800: la formazione della coscienza nell’Italia moderna (Milan, 1994); G. Hanlon, ‘The Decline of a Provincial Military Aristocracy’, Past & Present 155 (1997), pp. 3–36. S. Loriga, ‘L’identita` militare come aspirazioni sociale: nobili di provincia e nobilita` di corte nel Piemonte della seconda meta` del settecento’, Quaderni storici 77 (1990), pp. 445 – 71. Giuseppe Prato pointed to this erosion, but in a regional, as distinct from an atomised context, due to the annexation of Alessandria and Lomellina to Piedmont in the mid eighteenth century: ‘L’evoluzione agricola nel secolo xviii e le cause economiche dei moti del 1792 – 1799’, in Memorie della Accademia Reale di Torino, ser. II, 1 (1910), pp. 33 – 106. Archives de la Guerre [AG] (Vincennes), C3–6 (Ordres et Correspondance du Prince Eugene, 1805–10), Proclamation aux peuples des anciens e´tats du Pape, 2 April 1808. By 1809, these embraced all the former states of the mainland possessions of the House of Savoy (Savoy and Nice in 1792, the rest in 1802), the Republic of Genoa and the Duchies of Parma-Piacenza-Guastalla (1805), Tuscany (1808), and the Papal States (1802 for the provinces of the Emilia-Romagna, 1808 for the Marches, 1809 for Umbria and the Roman heartland). For the view that conscription became a routine obligation, passively accepted: Isser Woloch, The New Regime (New York, 1994), pp. 380–426, 432–3. Ironically, the de facto British ruler of Portugal, Beresford, enacted just such a sweeping process in Portugal between 1808 and 1813, with far greater, more lasting success than the French in Italy: A. Do Carmo Reis, As revoltas do Porto contra Junot (Lisbon, 1991), pp. 138 –40, for a brief analysis of the Orders of the Day. Ignazio Thaon di Revel, Memoires sur la guerre des Alpes (Turin, 1871), pp. 16–29. Walter Barberis, Le armi del Principe: La tradizione militare sabauda (Turin, 1988), pp. 268 – 9. Jean Nicolas, ‘Le ralliement des notables au re´gime impe´rial dans le de´partement du Mont-Blanc’, Revue de l’histoire moderne et contemporaine 19 (1972), pp. 92 – 127. AG XL (Troupes Allie’s, 1790–1815) 16, Troupes Pie´montaises. Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 318 –25. AG Xf 150 (Gendarmerie Nationale, Pie’mont, 1801), ‘Coup d’oeil du Ge´ne´ral Wirion sur le Pie´mont’, Year ix/1802. Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 182 –90. On Parma: AG C4–4A: Correspondance du Mare´chal Junot, Gouverneur-Ge´ne´ral du Parme ( January–July 1806). On Tuscany: AG C4 –93: Correspondance du Ge´ne´ral Reille pendant sa mission en Toscane (1807–8).

NOTES TO PAGES 290 –297

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23. ANP F 7 6523A (Police-General, Toscane, Rapports du Director-General), DirectorGeneral, Florence to Min. 3 arrondissement, police, August 1810. 24. ANP F 7 8888 (Police-General, department Rome), Director-General, Rome to Min. 3 arrond., 14 September 1810. 25. ANP AP, FR, 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 21 July 1813. 26. ANP F 7 8899 (Police-General, department Rome), Director-General, Rome to Min. Police-General, 20 September 1812. 27. See M. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au sie`cle des lumie`res (Paris, 1971). 28. ANP F 19 (1925 (Cultes) ‘Proposition d’un Concile Ge´ne´ral, 22 November 1809’. 29. ANP F 7 4308 (Police-General, Correspondance re´lative au Piedmont, ans ix–xi, affaires politiques) Jourdan to Min. Police-General, 5 jour comple´mentaire an ix/22 September. 30. ANP F 1e 87/88(Pays Annexe´s et Re´unis) 87/88 (E´tats de Parme, Plaisance et Guastelle) Rapport sur la situtation de l’Administration de Parme, Subde´le´gue´, Parma to the Administrative Prefect, Parma, 15 June 1806. 31. ANP F 1e 85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´unis, E´tats de Parme, Plaisance et Guastelle) Directeur, Lyce´e de Parme, to Min of the Interior, 25 August 1806. 32. Ibid., Administrative Prefect, Parma to Min of the Interior, 1 September 1806. 33. Ibid., Administrative Prefect, Parma to Min of the Interior, 8 September 1806. 34. David Bien, ‘La re´action aristocratique avant 1789: l’exemple de l’arme´e’, Annales e´conomiques, socie´te´s et civilisations 29 (1974), pp. 23–48; idem, ‘The Army and the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution’, Past & Present 85 (1979), pp. 68 –98. 35. ANP F 1e 85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´unis, E´tats de Parme, Plaisance et Guastelle), Administrative Prefect, Parma to Min of the Interior, 5 September 1806. 36. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), p. 57. 37. Mona Ozouf, L’homme re´ge´nere’ (Paris, 1989); idem, ‘Regeneration’, in F. Furet and M. Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 806–17; idem, ‘La re´volution franc
aise et l’ide´e de l’homme nouveau’, in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2: The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. C.R. Lucas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 213–32. 38. ANP F 1e 85 (Pays Annexe´s et Re´unis, E´tats de Parme, Plaisance et Guastelle), Administrative Prefect, Parma to Min of the Interior, 5 September 1806. 39. ANP F 7 6531 (Police-General, de´pt. Trasime`ne, Plaque II), Director-General, Rome, to Min. 3 arrond. police, 10 October 1812. 40. ANP F 7 8820 (Police-General, department Geˆnes), Rapport sur Franc
ois Assereto au min. 3 arrond. de police, 3 April 1812. 41. Adriano Prosperi, ‘“Otras Indias”: missionari della Contra-Riforma tra contadini e selvaggi’, in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Florence 1980 (Florence, 1982), pp. 205–34. On the tradition of violence in the region: Osvaldo Raggio, Faida e parentela: lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990). 42. ANP F 7 8820 (Police-General, de´pt. Geˆnes), Min. 3 arrond. de police to DirectorGeneral, Turin, 17 April 1812. 43. Archivio di Stato di Genoa, Prefettura Francese, Pacco 116, Fasciolo 155 (Alta Polizia), Director-General, Turin to Prefect, de´pt. Geˆnes, 30 January 1813. 44. Ibid., Sous-Pre´fet, arrond. Novi to Prefect, de´pt. Geˆnes, 4 June 1813. 45. Ibid., Petition of Lorenzo Carbone, May 1813. 46. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Segretario di Stato I, 1158 (Protocolli 1807–1809), Protocollo 7, December 1807.

350

NOTES TO PAGES 297 –306

47. Ibid., Protocollo 17, December 1807. 48. This is based on a study of Archivo di Stato, Florence, Buon Governo, Negozi di Polizia, for the years 1800–1807. 49. ANP AP, FR, 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 3 December 1811. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 12 June 1813. 52. ANP F 7 8888 (Police-General, de´pt. Rome), Director-General, Rome to Min. 3 arrond. Police, 2 September 1810. 53. Massimo D’Azeglio, Things I Remember (Oxford, 1966), p. 59. 54. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 55. Candido Bona, L‘Amicizie’: Societa` Segrete e rinascita religiosa (1770–1830) (Turin, 1962). 56. D’Azeglio, Things, p. 59. 57. Gian Paolo Romagnani, Prospero Balbo: intelletuale e uomo di stato (1762 – 1837), vol. 2: Da Napoleone a Carlo Alberto (1800 – 1837) (Turin, 1990), p. 222. 58. AG C3–6 (Ordres et Correspondance du Prince Eugene, 1805–1810), Eugene to Napoleon, 28 November 1808. 59. Franco Della Peruta, ‘War and Society in Napoleonic Italy’, in J. Davis and P. Ginsborg (eds), Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 29–30. 60. AG C3–6 (Ordres et Correspondance du Prince Eugene, 1805–10), Eugene to Napoleon, 13 September 1810. 61. Ibid., Eugene to Napoleon, 17 September 1810. 62. Ibid., Eugene to Napoleon, 26 December 1810. 63. ANP AP, FR, 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 24 January 1812. 64. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 11 June 1813. 65. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 24 April 1813. 66. Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, pp. 128 –32. 67. ANP AP, FR, 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 12 June 1813. 68. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 12 September 1813. 69. Ibid., Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 24 July 1813. 70. Gabriele Turi, Viva Maria! La reazione alle riforme Leopoldine, 1790–1799 (Florence, 1969). 71. ANP F 7 8799 (Police-General, de´pt. Arno), Director-General, Florence to Min. 3 arrond. Police, 3 November 1809. 72. Ibid., Min. 3 arrond. police to Director-General Police, Florence, 20 January 1810. 73. Ibid., Director-General de Police, Florence to Min. 3 arrond. Police, 8 August 1812. 74. ANP F 7 7016 (Police-General, Bulletins de Police, Florence), Director-General, Florence to Min. Police-General, 29 January 1813. 75. ANP F 7 8798 (Police-General 8798, de´pt. Arno), Director-General, Florence to Min. 3 arrond. Police, 12 July 1813. 76. J.A. Lynn, ‘Toward an Army of Honor: The Moral Evolution of the French Army, 1789– 1815’, French Historical Studies 16 (1989), pp. 1–24. 77. Alan Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, NC, 1990), pp. 89– 124. 78. ANP AP, FR, 29-AP-15, Antoine Roederer to Pierre-Louis Roederer, 24 January, 1812. 79. Franco Della Peruta, Esercito e societa` nell’Italia napoleonica (Milan, 1988) is the standard modern work. 80. For a comprehensive modern assessment of Foscolo: Foscolo e la cultura bresciana delprimo Ottocento (Brescia, 1979). 81. Luciano Guerci, ‘Incredulita` e rigenerazione nella Lombardia del tirennio repubblicano’, Rivista storica italiana 60 (1998), pp. 49– 120.

NOTES TO PAGE 307

351

82. Jacques Moulard (ed.), Lettres ine´dites du Comte Camille de Tournon, Pre´fet de Rome, 1809– 1814, 1e`re Partie: La Politique et l’esprit public (Paris, 1914), p. 37: Tournon to DirectorGeneral de Police, Rome, 17 May 1810. 83. In general, conscription met little overt resistance in these regions, as opposed to upland areas. For specific local examples: Grab, ‘Army, state and society’ and ‘State power’; Broers, Napoleonic Imperalism, pp. 318– 25. These trends follow those discerned by Woloch and Forrest within France at the outset of Napoleonic rule. For a wider European perspective: Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London, 1996), pp. 70– 7. 84. Woloch, New Regime, p. 424. 85. Archivio Comunale, Genoa, Impero Francese, filza 328 (Commissari di Polizia, 1806– 1814), Commissaire de Police, S. Vincenzo to Maire of Genoa, 11 February 1814.

FURTHER READING

Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 3 vols (London, 1975), vol. 1. Broers, Michael, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773 –1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997). —— The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War Against God, 1801 – 1814 (Abingdon, 2001). —— The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796– 1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2015). Broers, Michael and John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (London, 1988). Davis, John A. (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). —— Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions 1780 – 1860 (Oxford, 2006). Esdaile, Charles J., Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808– 1814 (New Haven, 2004). Lovett, Gordon, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain (New York, 1965). The following collections contain important contributions to all the areas of the Napoleonic Mediterranean: Aaslestad, Katherine B. and Johan Joor (eds), Revisiting Napoleon’s Continental System. Local, Regional and European Experiences (Basingstoke, 2015). Broers, Michael, Peter Hicks and Agustı´n Guimera (eds), The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke, 2012). * Planert, Ute and Frank Blackaly (eds), Napoleon’s Empire (Basingstoke, 2016). * See especially: Marko Troglic´, ‘French Rule in Dalmatia, 1806– 1814: Globalising a local geopolitics,’ pp. 264– 76, and Peter Vodopivec, ‘Illyrian Provinces from a Slovene perspective: Myth and reality’, pp. 252– 62. These are the only substantial treatments of this region in English, and unfortunately appeared too late to be consulted for this volume.

INDEX

Abruzzi, 17, 53, 57– 58, 60 Acqui, 253 Acton, John (Lord), 54 Adriatic, 6, 20–22, 192–193, 201, 203, 211 Africa, 5, 268 agriculture, 87–88, 193, 213 Agro Romano, 243 Alatri, 268 Alba, 236 Albertine Code, 260 Aldini, 80, 115– 116 Alessandria, 226 –227, 229, 232, 234, 245 –246, 253, 289 Alfonso IV, 184 Alps, 16, 18–19, 26, 28, 47, 62, 67 –68, 122, 199, 212, 291 Alsace, 234 Alto-Adige, 110 Alvazzi del Frate, Paolo, 248 Amiens, Peace of, 20 ancien re´gime, 4, 10–11, 17–18, 27, 29–30, 34, 38, 50–53, 59–60, 62–63, 66, 68–69, 71, 74, 76, 78, 80–83, 89–90, 94, 96–97, 99, 100, 102–103, 105, 113, 116, 120, 128,

130, 147, 153, 157, 160, 168, 172, 174–175, 177–178, 183, 185, 188, 190, 193–195, 198, 206, 214, 216, 223–225, 227–228, 230, 233, 235, 240, 243–244, 249, 254, 269, 284, 290, 294–296 Ancona, 300 Andalusia, 12, 149, 152, 177 Anderson, Benedict, 41 Annales (school of history), 1, 7, 73 Antonielli, Livio, 23 –24 Apennines, 4, 28–29, 47, 65–69, 71 –77, 81, 83, 110, 267 –268, 270, 291, 296 Aquila, 57, 60, Arago´n, 4–5, 132 Aretino, 110, Arezzo, 297, 303 Aristotle, 26, 30 Assante, Franca, 67 Assereto, Francesco, 296, 304 Asti, 229, 253 Astigiano, 56 Asturias, 149, 177 Atlantic Ocean, 15, 22– 23

Audencı´a, 134–137, 158–160, 167, 176–177, 183, 187, 279, 282 Augereau, Pierre, 132, 134, 137–141, 144 –145, 164, 181–182 Austria, 55–56, 95, 110, 120, 122, 130 –131, 193–195, 199 –202, 206–208, 211 –214, 216, 218, 224 –226, 289–290 Auvergne, 216, 228, 268 Avogadro, 228– 229 Axtell, James, 276 Azuni, 253, 256 Badia, 185 –186 Baglioni, 302 Balbo, Cesare, 271 Balearics, 20, 22 Balkans, 5– 6, 35, 41– 42, 193, 202 Bangolas, 148 Barcelona, 21–22, 133–138, 140–142, 144–146, 156, 159–160, 164–165, 167, 169, 173–185, 187, 284 Baroque, 77, 268, 291, 296 Bartocci, 303

354

THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

Basilicata, 52 Batavia, 194 Bavaria, 18–19, 110, 259 Bayamonti, Antonio, 209–211, 214 Bayly, Christopher, 283 Beates, 149 Beaumont-Brivazac, Hubert de, 284 Beccaria, Cesare, 39, 90, 95, 100–101, 104, 107, 109, 112–115, 120, 129, 209 Belgium, 136, 172, 174, 185, 224–225, 259 Bell, David A., 77, 100 Bellinzona, 18 Bentham, Jeremy, 115 Bentinck, 22 Benton, Lauren, 119 Benvenuti, 207 Berg, 166 Bergerie, Rougier de la, 209 Berlin, 15 Bertolotti, 228 Bertrand, Henri, 10, 208, 213 Beyts, Joseph-Franc ois, 259–260 Bigot-Pre´meaux, 237, 255 Blake, 144, 163 Bloch, Marc, 3 Blondel, 142 Boccaccio, 272 Bologna, 29, 53, 73, 87, 94, 110, 124, 129 Bonaparte, Elisa, 270, 281–282 Bonaparte, Joseph, 21, 73, 132, 152, 155 –156, 176–177, 183 Bonaparte, Louis, 18 Bonaparte, Lucien, 152 Bonaparte, Pauline, 270, 281 Bonizi, 58 Borghese, Carlo, 270, 277, 281, 289

Borromeo, Carlo, 3, 4, 8, 266 Botton, Ugo, comte di Castellamonte, 80, 228–229, 231, 237–238, 241, 257, 270 Boucher, 147, 177 Bouches de l’Ebre, 133, 157, 160 Bouches de l’Escault, 165 Bouches du Rhin, 165 Bourbon dynasty, 9, 20, 38, 51, 61, 157, 161, 177–180, 182, 184–185, 188 Branda di Luciano, 55– 56 Branoni, 300 Braudel, Fernand, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 12–21, 24, 38, 43, 67–68, 73, 192 Brayda, 256 Brescia, 29 Britain, 6, 15, 18–23, 32, 70, 78, 82, 130, 133, 199, 212, 219, 275, 283, 285 Brumaire coup, 35, 152 Brunet, Michel, 18, 135 Brussels, 175 Budua, 203– 204, 208 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 32, 291 Cabmox, Pedro, 145 Cadiz, 20 –21 Calabria, 7, 21, 47, 51–52, 58, 62 Canon law, 109, 158, 248 Canova, 266 Capuchin order, 56 Carbonara, 253, 255 Carbone, Lorenzo, 297 Carignano, 258 Carinola, 193–195, 199–200, 202, 207, 211, 213–214, 216 Carinthia, 193 –195, 202, 207, 211, 216, 218

Carlos III, 9, 161, 183–184 Carlos IV, 154 –155, 157, 184 Carrascosa, Pedro del Pozo, 136, 158, 184, 189 Casale, 229, 245, 253 Casanova, 136, 140–142, 164 Castagneri, 247 Castellon de Arripurias, 145 Castiglione, Guido, 131 Castile, 12, 139, 144, 158, 173, 176, 178–184 Catalonia, 9, 12, 18, 22, 132–144, 146 –189, 190–191, 205 –206, 234 Catherine II (Catherine the Great), 31 –33 Catholic Church (also church), 3, 5, 8, 11, 25, 27–28, 34–35, 41–42, 72, 75, 77, 81–82, 97–98, 101–102, 104, 106, 108–109, 142–143, 153, 156, 242, 266, 268, 273, 291–293, 296 Cattaro (Kotor), 192, 194–195, 203, 208–209, 213 Cavalli d’Olivola, 241, 250 Cavours, 80, 277 Celian, 214 Cerdayna, 168 Ceva, 253 Chabot, Georges, 97, 99 Chadwick, Owen, 62 Chamber of Accounts, 228, 230, 235, 252 Charbol, 201, 215, 217 Charlemagne, 266 Charles III see Carlos III Charles V, 284 Charles Albert I, 258 Chauvelin, BernardFranc ois de, 139, 141, 144–145, 165, 169,

INDEX 174–178, 180, 183–184, 186 –188 Cherasco, 56, 289 Chigi, Princess, 249 China, 26, 33, 42, 70 Cicero, 36, 39 –40, 118 Cicolano, 57 Ciravenga family, 56 Cisalpine Republic, 60, 121, 194 Cispadane, 87 Clary family, 10 Clergy, 3, 51–52, 57–58, 80, 82, 88, 136, 157, 204, 211, 266, 272, 291–292, 294 –295 Cochin, Augustin, 49 Code Napoleon (Civil Code), 38, 40, 79, 82, 92–105, 107 –109, 120, 122, 129 –131, 139, 142–144, 153–156, 159, 163, 166–167, 178 –179, 183, 190, 195 –196, 202, 215, 217 –219, 242, 246–247, 257–259, 263 Code Penal (Criminal Code), 109–119, 120 –121, 124–125, 127, 129, 150, 190, 197, 209–210 Codes of Procedure, 109, 119–127, 159, 196–197 Coffinhal-Dunoyer, Joseph, 9, 196–202, 204–215, 218–219, 241, 244–245, 247–252, 254 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 295 College of Cardinals, 242 Colonna, 81, 249 Con, Peyretti di, 80 Concordat, 40, 42, 142 Condorcet, 39, 118 Condove, Peyretti di, 231, 235, 250, 257, 270

Confederation of the Rhine, 23 conscription, 25, 30, 37, 40, 56, 78–79, 83, 90, 110–112, 211 –213, 218–219, 261, 264, 286–289, 291, 297–299, 301, 304, 306–307 Conseil d’Etat, 28, 139 Constantine, 107 Consulate (consular regime), 36, 41, 118, 161, 262, 284 Consulta`, 142, 149, 168, 197, 226, 239, 243, 246, 248–251 Continental Blockade, 14–18, 20–21, 23, 29, 133, 135, 145 Continental System, 15–17, 19, 22–23 Corfu, 20, 22 Corps Le´gislatif, 150, 236, 238 corrigedor, 136, 172, 184 Corsica, 6, 58, 242, 296 Cortes, Hernando, 78 Costa, 231, 256 Cotta, 236– 237 Council of State, 79, 209, 239, 241, 284 Council of Trent, 3 Counter-Reformation, 74–76, 296 Cour de Cassation, 104, 168, 176, 197, 213, 228, 231, 241, 248, 271 Cour Impe´riale, 82, 173, 176–177, 183, 187, 241–243, 245, 247, 250–256 Court of Appeal, 78, 107, 112, 126, 141, 156, 169, 171, 177, 199, 206–209, 227, 231–235, 237 –239, 241–242, 245 –253,

355 256, 258–259, 270–271 Couthon, 228 Croatia, 6, 13, 193 –196, 202, 211, 216 –218, 247 Cultes, 266, 291 Cuneo, 227, 238 Cunesee, 62 d’Almbert, 209 d’Amelin, Uraux, 136 d’Auzers, 276 d’Azeglio, Massimo, 299–300 Dainotto, Roberto, 26–27 Dalmatia, 7, 21, 190, 193–196, 198 –199, 202, 207–212, 215, 218 Dal Pozzo, Ferdinando, 29, 149, 197, 223 –260, 271, 283 Dandolo, Vincezo, 196–198, 201–202, 212, 216 Davis, John, 72, 79 De Cain, General, 159 De Francesco, Antonino, 120 De Jacobis, Angelo, 60–61 De Pauw, Cornelius, 31–32, 291 De Simon, 254 –255 De Simoni, Albert, 103–105 Degerando, Joseph-Marie, 9, 137, 139 –147, 149–189, 272 –273, 275, 277–279, 284 Delaistre, Franc ois-Nicolas, 232 Denina, Carlo, 271 Denmark, 224 de´partements re´unis, 65–67, 71–73, 77–80, 82–83, 224,

356

THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

250, 262, 264, 277, 281, 288, 301 Descleau, 205 Devlin, Judith, 62 Diavolo, Fra see Pezza, Michele Diderot, Denis, 31–32 Dinaric Alps, 10, 192–193, 199, 202, 209, 212 Directory, 137, 152, 233, 302 Dominican order, 51 Don Vincente Travi, 169 Dubois, 271 Dubrovnik see Ragusa Duchet, Michele, 31 Duhesme, Guillaume, 134–136, 140–141 Dumas, Alexandre, 62–63 Ebro, River, 132– 133, 140, 157 Egypt, 6, 20, 27, 264, 284 Ellis, Geoffrey, 16–17, 36 Emilia-Romagna, 29, 79, 87, 110 Enlightenment, 2, 3, 5, 13, 31, 35, 47, 87–89, 96, 100, 108–109, 113, 117, 122–123, 127–131, 202, 210, 261, 265, 267, 269, 291 Esdaile, Charles, 5, 13–14, 145 Espoz y Mina, Francisco, 17 Estremadura, 172 Eugene de Beauharnais, 19, 73, 116, 121, 279, 288 family law, 989, 101–106, 108–109, 119, 125, 128–129 Fascism, 50, 67 Federalist, 6, 140 –141, 143, 152, 183 Ferdinand III, 50, 272 Ferdinand VII, 187, 257 Ferrara, 53

feudalism, 12, 52, 74, 81, 88, 105, 143, 153–154, 161–162, 165–166, 185–186, 195–196, 215–219 Figueras, 133–134, 137–138, 140–141, 145, 163, 168–169, 171, 175, 187 Florence, 26, 78, 224, 230, 238, 240 – 241, 246, 250 – 251, 266, 270, 275 – 276, 279, 281 – 285, 290, 297, 304 Folgino, 303 Fontainebleau decree, 16 Fontanabuona, 74 Font y Gauzi, 147–148 Forrest, Alan, 305 Forlı`, 110 Foscolo, Ugo, 306 Fragoniani, 276 Franco-Austrian War, 110 Franco-Spanish Alliance, 133 French Revolution, 2–8, 11, 21–22, 34, 47, 49, 51, 61–62, 71, 81, 97, 109, 127–128, 136, 172, 195, 203, 225 Frı´as, Lo´pez de, 135 Gaddis, John Lewis, 1 Galli, 228 Gay, Peter, 88 Gellner, Ernest, 74 Genoa, 74, 78, 81, 142, 152, 224, 230, 238, 243, 246, 250 –259, 262, 264, 276, 278–279, 282, 284, 290, 296, 307 Germany, 16 – 17, 19, 143, 153, 161, 166, 172 – 174, 182, 185, 195, 206 – 207, 219, 224 – 245, 230, 284 Geyl, Pieter, 91

Gianni, 50 Gibraltar, 20 Giddens, Anthony, 65 –66, 69, 73, 83 Gioia, Maurangelo De, 56 Girona, 133–134, 137–140, 142, 144–146, 148, 151–152, 155, 163, 167–171, 173, 175, 186–187 Girona-Figueras enclave, 134, 138, 145, 163, 169 Goths, 122 Gouvion St Cyr, Laurent, 135, 140 Grab, Alex, 18 Gramsci, Antonio, 3–5, 66–67 Grand Tour, 13, 26–28, 69 Grassellini, Giovani, 297 Greece, 194 Greek Orthodox church, 204 greffiers, 162, 206 Guala, 300 Guardia, Melchoir de, 178 Guerci, Luciano, 306 Guimera, Augustin, 21 Guyana, 296 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 9 Habsburg dynasty, 9, 87, 89, 95, 117, 171–172, 190–191, 193 –195, 202, 219, 224 Hague, The, 259 Hamburg, 182 Hansa, 142, 182 Hanseatic cities, 143, 153, 165–166, 234, 259 Heligoland, 20 Hellas, 194 Helvetic Confederation, 18, 194 Hesperia, 50 –51, 55, 59, 62

INDEX Hofer, Andreas, 17, 110, 211 Holland, 16, 18, 142–143, 165, 172, 181, 206, 224, 230, 234, 259, 284 Holy See, 51 Homs, 177 Hortalrich, 147, 186 Humanism, 88, 95, 109, 112 Hume, David, 189 Hungary, 193 –195, 216 Iberia, 4–6, 13 –14, 22–23, 35, 41 Illyrian provinces, 6, 8–9, 13, 20, 23 –24, 38, 181, 182, 190 –219, 247, 284 India (Raj), 31, 70, 76, 78, 82, 130, 283, 285 Introdaqua, 57 Israel, Jonathan, 88, 128 Istria, 194– 195, 200, 207, 211, 214 Italy, Kingdom/Republic of, 4–6, 8, 10 –11, 13–14, 16, 18–20, 23–25, 27 –30, 35, 38–42, 47 –50, 52–54, 56 –57, 59–60, 62, 64–84, 87–131, 135, 142, 161, 163, 172, 185, 192, 194–196, 198, 200–201, 206–207, 212–214, 219, 223–227, 230, 233–235, 239, 245–247, 250–251, 254, 258–260, 261–285, 286–307 Jacobins (giacobini), 6, 47–50, 52 –54, 56, 61, 74, 152, 225, 262, 264, 272, 283, 300, 306–307

Jansenism, 52 Jaubert, 173 Jesuits, 3 –4, 32–34, 41, 75, 293–294, 299–300 Joseph II, 9, 48, 89–90, 95, 117, 130, 193, 201, 216 Jourdan, Jean-Baptiste, 226, 232, 292 Jourde, 228 –235, 237 – 239, 241–242, 244, 246, 248–249, 257, 267 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 39, 108 Juge(s) de paix, 138, 146–148, 160, 169, 172, 174, 185 –186 July Monarchy, 163 Junot, 279 Justinian Code, 91–92, 97, 103–104, 106 –107, 131 Karlstadt, 202 Kiernan, Victor, 261, 285 Kotor see Cattaro La Grave, 238, 252–253, 255–256 Laberio, Ambrogio, 108 Lagarde, 270, 273, 275– 276, 279, 281 –285 Lameth, Alexander, 300 Langhe, 56 Langosco, The´ophile, 235–236 latifundi, 47, 55 Lattimore, Owen, 76 –77, 84 Laybach (Ljubljana), 195, 199–201, 206 –207, 211, 213 Lebrun, Charles-Franc ois, 152, 254 Legonidec, 243, 245–252, 254 Lentz, Thierry, 13

357 Leopoldine reforms, 122, 247, 272 Lerida, 175, 177 Lestrude, Ferrol, 167 Liepopilly, 204 Liguria, 11, 16–17, 25, 54, 66, 75, 78, 82, 108, 228, 234, 237 –238, 246, 251, 252 –256, 259, 270, 296 –297 Lissa, 211 Livorno, 22 Ljubljana see Laybach Llanca`, 140 Lombardy, 23– 24, 28–29, 42, 48, 55, 79, 87, 89–90, 94 –95, 122, 129–131, 210, 225, 283, 306 longue dure´e, 1, 3, 4, 20–21, 25, 38, 65, 188 Lorraine, 172, 174, 234 Louis XIV, 33 –35, 266, 295 Louis XV, 182 Louis XVI, 174, 182 Loysel, Pierre, 300 Lugo, 53 Luosi, Giuseppe, 94, 98–102, 105 –106, 113–116, 121 –123, 125, 129 Lynn, John, 305 Lyon, 7, 151 –152 Lys, 175 Maanen, Cornelis van, 259–260 MacDonald, Jacques, 137, 141–142, 144 –145, 153, 156, 164 Machiavelli, 3, 33–34, 306 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 63 Madinaveyita, 136 Madrid, 135–136, 152, 176, 179–180, 183 Malta, 6, 20–21

358

THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

Marches (Italy), 54, 60, 87, 89, 122, 288, 300, 306 Marcorengo, 256 Marengo, 226, 238, 253 Maria-Christina, 187 Marmont, Auguste, 196, 198, 212–214 Marseille, 10, 22 Marxism, 4, 66 Marzagalli, Silvia, 20, 22–23 Matigo, 167 Max-Josef I, 19 Mazarin, Jules, 266 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 11 Medici, 275 Medinaveita, Juan-Josef de, 177 Melzi, Francescod’Aril, 80, 130, 263 Menieta, A´lvarez de, 135 Menou, Jacques-Franc ois, 232, 279, 284, 289 Metternich, 219 Metz, 234 Mezzogiorno, 21, 40, 52, 54–55, 264 Midi, 6, 24, 40– 41 Milan, 10–11, 15, 21, 29, 73, 80, 91, 100, 110, 112, 116, 122, 126, 131, 214, 258 –259, 284 Ministry of Justice, 79, 94, 125, 143, 150 –152, 155, 165, 168, 173, 175, 180–181, 197, 199, 205, 209, 215, 231–232, 237, 242, 248, 253, 256, 265, 271 Ministry of Police-General, 79, 164 Ministry of the Interior, 215, 275 Modena, 11, 23, 29, 94, 105, 129–130 Modena, Duchy of, 87, 89, 122

Mohammed, 26 Molfetta, 51, 56 Molini, 255 Moncalvo, 239, 252 Mondovı`, 53, 56 Montmorency, 302 Montenotte, 253–254 Monserrat, 133 Montenegro, 199, 211 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 13, 25–32, 34–36, 39–41, 108, 117, 129, 171 Montgelas, Maximilian von, 19 Montiglio, 238 –241, 250 Montpellier, 173 Moreau, 279 Morlaques, 196, 202, 209 Mosca, Gaetano, 8, 11 Mottura, 236–237 Munich, 19, 259 Murat, Joachim, 22, 73, 79 Muthu, Sankar, 31 Naples, Kingdom of, 6, 9, 13–14, 20 –21, 27, 53–54, 65, 67, 73–74, 79–80, 156, 218, 224, 262, 266, 284 Nardon, 274, 277, 279, 281 Narzole, 17, 56 Navarre, 17, 132 Negri, 117 Neo-Jansenism, 52 Neustadt, 200 Nice, 62, 225 Nizzati, 228 Nordman, Daniel, 68 North Sea, 15, 20, 181, 224 Norvins, Jacques Marquet de Montbreton, baron de, 4–5, 268, 273, 277, 284 Novara, 55 Novi, 297 Nueva Planta, 181 –184 Octavian, 107

Olmo, Josef de, 177 Olmo, Soler del, 135 Ombronne, 272 Oratorians, 293 Orle´ans, 150 Orne, 271 Ottoman Empire, 195, 199, 202, 211, 269 Oudart, 126 Ozouf, Mona, 34, 36– 38 Padania, 68 Padua, 192 Palin, 214 Papal States, 6, 24, 57–58, 66, 78, 80, 82, 87, 136, 149, 156, 239, 242, 244, 262, 265, 273, 279, 288, 290–292, 300 Pareto, Vilfredo, 8, 11 Parez, 140, 149, 167–168, 171–172 Parlement, 228, 230, 234, 254 Parma, 11, 75, 80, 224, 262, 274, 277, 279, 281, 290, 292, 295, 299 Parma-Piacenza, 66, 109–110 Parma-Piacenza-Guastella, 11 Pavia, 39, 55 peasantry, 5, 11, 14–15, 47, 51, 55, 57–58, 79, 81, 102, 110–112, 188, 216–218, 225, 284, 289–291, 298, 300, 304–305, 307 Pedro III, 184 Pelet de la Loze`re, Joseph comte, 164 Pellegati, 106 –107, 114, 117–118, 127 Perpignan, 164, 167, 173 Peter I (Peter the Great), 31–35

INDEX Peter-Leopold, 50, 75, 114, 272 Peyretti di Condove, 80, 231, 235–238, 250, 257, 270 Peyro, Jean, 17 Pezza, Michele, 17 Philip II of Spain, 1, 7, 73 Philip V of Spain, 157–158, 176, 179, 181–184 Piacentino, 10–11, 15, 110, 135, 147 Piacenza, 11, 66, 109–110, 262, 272 Piedmont, 8, 16–17, 24, 28–29, 42, 53–58, 62, 66, 75, 77–80, 149, 172–174, 178, 197, 223–260, 266–267, 270 –271, 274, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291 –292, 294, 299–302, 305 Pinelli, 245–247 Pisa, 39 Pistoia, 110, 272 Pius VII, 81, 242, 266 Po valley, 11, 29, 55, 87, 110 Pollano, 237 Pollard, Sidney, 261 Pontenani, 297 Portalis, Joseph-Marie, comte, 97 Portugal, 23 Prina, Giuseppe, 80, 236 Pronio, 57 Provence, 173 Prussia, 92, 226, 259 Puglia, 47, 56–57 Puig, Toma`s, 137 –142, 144–145, 147, 153, 156, 159–160, 162, 166, 168, 177 –180, 182–183, 185, 187 Puigcerda`, 147, 168 Pyrenees, 16, 18, 169, 188, 291

Quakers, 32 Raggio, Osvaldo, 82 Ragno, Felice, 56 Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 10, 22, 192, 194–196, 208 –209, 213, 216–218 Ravenna, 110 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 30–32 Rebmann, Georg Friedrich von, 259 –260 Rees, 166 Reggio Calabria, 7 Reille, Honore´, 138, 276 Renaissance, 266, 306 Reouard, 164, 167 Republic of St George, 253, 296 Republic of St Mark, 88, 122, 192 Restoration, 79, 257–259, 300 Reynier, Claude, 168 Rhine, River, 224 Rhineland, 233 –234, 259 Riba, Joan Mercader i, 183 Ricciardi, Giuseppe, 80 Risorgimento, 48–49, 299 Ritori, 106 –107 Rocca, 235– 237, 257 Roederer, Antoine, 269, 271, 281, 284 –285, 286–287, 288, 290, 298–303, 305 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 266, 275, Roman law, 39, 94–95, 97–106, 108 –109, 117–118, 129, 157–158, 238 Rome, 4, 9, 14–15, 26, 34, 39–40, 43, 58, 78, 80, 122, 149–152, 168, 175, 177, 189, 197, 206, 224, 230, 238, 239–251, 252–257, 259, 265–268, 273,

359 275, 277–279, 284, 290, 295, 299, 301, 305, 307 Rougier, 111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 Roussillon, 17, 135, 147, 161, 173, 182 Roveretto, Luigi, 256– 257 Royal Navy, 20–22, 211 Rubat, 234 Ruffo, Fabrizio, 54–56, 60 Russia, 31– 33, 50, 212, 226, 264 Sahlins, Peter, 18 Said, Edward, 34, 36, 269, 280 Saint Cyr military academy, 299–300 Salm, 166 Salt Wars, 17 Saluzzo di Monsiglio, Alessandro, 289 Santo, 204 Sarazzana, 274 Sardinia, 61, 226, 256–257 Savona, 253 –254 Savoy, House of, 9, 16, 23, 51, 61, 76, 223–227, 230, 240, 253, 257–258, 260, 262, 281, 289 Sciarra, Princesse, 249 Scotland, 70–71 Scotti-Douglas family, 11 Scythians, 202 Second Coalition, 224 Second Directory, 302 Segre, 133 Se´gur, Philippe Paul, comte de, 294 Senate, 227–230, 235, 238, 240–241, 246, 249– 251, 253, 256–258 Serge, 147–148, 169 Serrao, Giovanni, 51 Sicily, 8, 20– 22, 61, 175 Siena, 224, 272 Simancas, 39

360

THE NAPOLEONIC MEDITERRANEAN

Sirocco, 28–29, 35 Slovenia, 6, 9, 13, 193, 195–196, 199, 247 Smuggling, 15–18, 20–23, 57, 69, 211 –213 Soult, Jean-de-Dieu, 12, 21, 149, 152, 177 Souques, 150 Spain, 5–9, 12–14, 18, 20–24, 31, 38–39, 41–42, 51, 70, 132–137, 140, 142–149, 156–157, 162–163, 171–173, 177, 180–183, 185, 187, 257, 284 Spanish War of Independence, 47, 49 Spoleto, 269, 281, 285, 298, 305 Stoffa, Connestabile, 287, 291–292, 296 –297, 302, 304, 307 Straits of Messina, 20 –22 Suchet, Marshal, 4–5, 12, 21, 175, 177, 187 Sulieman, 7 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 174 Tanucci, Bernardo, 39 Taro, 110 Tarragona, 133–134, 136, 175, 177 taxation, 22, 30, 54, 58, 83, 87, 90, 110, 211, 216–218,263 Terror, Reign of, 175, 228, 300 Thaon di revel, Carlo Francesco, 289 Thermidor revolt, 228 Tibet, 76 Tincino, 18 Tixier, 231–232, 234–238, 241 togati, 9, 38, 109, 248, 251

Tolfa, 57–59 Tortosa, 175, 177, 296 Toulouse, 228 Tournon, Camille de, 175, 250, 267–268, 274–277, 279–281, 284, 301, 307 Trafalgar, Battle of, 20 Trajan, 39 Trani, 57 Trasimeno, 286 Trento, 110 Trianon Tariff Treaties, 16 triennio, 48 –49, 51, 61, 87, 90, 99, 120, 225, 228–229, 231, 233, 261, 264 Trier, 259 Trieste, 192, 194, 200, 206–207 Tudors, 71 Turgot, 162 Turin, 78, 206, 223 –224, 226–235, 237 –241, 246–248, 250 –251, 253, 256, 258, 270, 277, 281–282, 284–285, 289 –296, 300 Tuscany, 9, 48, 54, 56 –57, 66, 75, 78 –80, 82, 109–110, 114, 122, 129, 185, 234, 238–241, 246 –247, 251, 262, 270, 272–273, 278 –279, 281–282, 285, 290, 297, 303–304 Tyrol, 18, 47, 212 Tyrolean revolt, 17, 19, 47, 61, 67, 110, 211 Umbria, 80, 175, 266, 269, 281, 287, 290, 295, 298, 300 –303, 305 Uscio, 296

Valencia, 12, 177 Valenti, 177 Vende´e, 24, 47, 49, 264 Veneto, 73 Venice, Republic of, 18, 24–27, 88 –90, 94, 110, 130, 190, 192–195, 201 –202, 208, 210 Vercelli, 229, 235 –238, 245, 252, 257 Verdaquez, 177 Verri, Alessandro, 95, 100, 105 Verri, Gabriele, 95 Verri, Pietro, 95, 105 Victor Amadeus II, 223 Victor Amadeus III, 225–226 Victor Emmanuel I, 257–258 Viefville, 169–170 Vienna, 87, 95 Vies, 146– 147 Viscaya, 132 Viva Maria risings, 48 Voltaire, 26, 30 –35, 39–40, 128 –129, 189 Wachtel, Nathan, 263 Wagram, Battle of, 211 Westphalia, 166, 172 Woloch, Isser, 307 Woolf, Stuart, 36, 264, 284 World War II, 20 Wyndham, William Frederick, 275 Zara, 195, 201, 204, 206–209, 215 Zaragossa, 135 Zurlo, Giuseppe, 79 –80