Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (91 page)

A powerful backlash followed this avalanche of change, and in 1798–9 French forces in Italy struggled to contain it. Bonaparte, who sailed romantically to Egypt in May 1798, could not intervene in person. The exiled pope, Pius VI, implacable after being stripped of his temporal powers, inspired resistance. Britain marshalled a second anti-French coalition. The Russians sent a powerful army into Italy under Field Marshal Suvorov, and a fleet under Admiral Gorchakov to join the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. The king of Naples, seizing the opportunity provided by Bonaparte’s absence in Egypt, recaptured Rome, only to flee as soon as the French counter-attacked, sailing in haste from Naples aboard Nelson’s flagship. Pending Bonaparte’s return to Europe, all arrangements necessarily seemed temporary.

Italian affairs were vastly complicated by the far-reaching tentacles of the House of Bourbon. The late Louis XVI of France had been a Bourbon; the king of Spain was a Bourbon; the king of Naples was a Bourbon; and so, too, was the duke of Parma, whose possessions almost touched Tuscany in the north. The duke tried to secure his position by paying the French a million
livres
and sending twenty-five of his best paintings to the Louvre, hoping to turn himself into a key pawn on the political chessboard. It was of the Bourbons that France’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, was much later to say: ‘They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.’
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French diplomacy at this point was juggling with half a dozen issues, most of which had a Tuscan aspect. Negotiations with Spain, which eventually led to the secret treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1800), aimed to facilitate the purchase by France of Spain’s American province of Louisiana; Tuscany was being dangled in front of the Spanish Bourbons as an inducement to accept the deal. Negotiations with Naples were conducted in Florence, where the Neapolitan Bourbons were being offered the restoration of their kingdom on condition that their ports remained closed to Britain’s Royal Navy. Negotiations with Portugal sought likewise to exclude the British. Negotiations with Britain itself at Amiens were leading at snail’s pace towards a formal treaty that would not be signed until March 1802; the British were characteristically most concerned about the freedom of maritime trade. Negotiations with the papacy assumed that revolutionary, anti-religious fanaticism was running its course; the proposed Concordat would restore Catholicism to France but not the Papal States to the papacy.

Tuscany, which depended on overseas trade and was the immediate neighbour of the Papal States, could not be indifferent either to commercial negotiations or to the Franco-papal conflict. The French army’s occupation of Rome in February 1798 caused passions to rise, and the grand duke’s decision to welcome the fugitive pope raised tensions. The grand duke was acutely aware of French suspicions, so when he gave shelter in 1798–9 not only to the pope but also to a varied company of ‘reactionary’ exiles, including the king of Sardinia, he cannot have been totally surprised by the consequences. Pius VI, frail and eighty-one years old, was accommodated throughout the winter in the
Forestiera
or ‘Forest Lodge’ of the Carthusian Certosa di Galluzzo near Florence, a favourite destination for day trippers from the city:

The monastery is built on a circular hill; the building is extremely irregular… [But] there are few subjects in Tuscany which a painter would rather study. The great square within the monastery is surrounded by a colonnade supporting the roof.

Each hermit has two or three small rooms to himself and a little plot of ground. Some were employed in reading; some cultivated their gardens, while others would mope in gloomy melancholy… they seldom spoke, silence being a virtue of the Order of St Bruno… One of their favourite amusements after meals was to feed some two hundred cats, which came mewing and squalling beneath the windows from the woods below.
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But the Directory in Paris feared a rescue, so on 28 March 1799 the pope was plucked from his Florentine asylum and transported across the Alps under duress. He died in captivity at Valence after reigning twenty-four years. His death was a black omen for his erstwhile Tuscan hosts.
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Worse was to follow. In the summer of 1799 Florence was the scene of violent commotions. A republican faction took control of the municipality and invited a small French force into the city. An
Albero della Libertà
, a ‘Tree of Liberty’, was raised in the Piazza della Signoria, the revolutionary calendar was imposed, together with heavy taxes, and the militants forced the grand duke and many clerics to depart. A violent counter-revolution then broke out in nearby Arezzo. Fomented by the new pope, Pius VII (r. 1800–1823), who had been elected in an emergency conclave in Venice, bloodthirsty peasant bands roamed the countryside to cries of ‘
Viva Maria!
’ before storming into Florence and slaughtering any Frenchman too slow to escape. The grand duke’s supporters restored order with the help of Austrian troops. They won but a short stay of execution.

The turbulence in Tuscany coincided with still more gruesome horrors in the south. French difficulties in southern Italy had multiplied in proportion to the extreme violence sanctioned by the royalist Neapolitan opposition. The king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, was a son of the former Spanish king, Charles III; his wife, the Archduchess Maria Carolina, was the daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa and sister of Marie-Antoinette, the executed wife of Louis XVI. After the declaration of the Neapolitan Parthenopean Republic in 1799, they had retired with their court to Palermo in Sicily, whence a ferocious campaign of resistance was organized. The
lazzaroni
– counterparts of the Spanish
guerrillas
– fought the French with great courage and cruelty, while a ‘Christian Army of the Holy Faith’, the
Sanfedisti
, advanced from Calabria under the none-too-Christian Cardinal Ruffo. Fire, plunder and massacre spread far and wide; the cardinal’s irregulars were supported both by a squadron of the Russian navy and by Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was rewarded with the title of duke of Brontë. The return of the royal couple to Naples in December 1800 was attended by mass executions and punitive trials.

In 1800, having effectively appointed himself first consul in France, Bonaparte returned to Italy with a vengeance. Crossing the Great St Bernard for a second time, he descended onto the plain of Lombardy and blew his enemies away like chaff. At Marengo in June, he defeated the Austrians so thoroughly that the rest of the peninsula lay at his feet. The Second Coalition was dead; the French resurgence was unstoppable. Negotiations began at Lunéville for a comprehensive European settlement that was finally signed the following February. France gained the left bank of the Rhine. Six French-run republics, four of them in Italy, received international recognition; Tuscany was to be disposed of as the first consul thought fit. In October 1800 General Joachim Murat (1767–1815), Napoleon’s aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, led a large French force into Tuscany which occupied the whole region, broke into Florence, sacked churches and perpetrated atrocities. Murat, a cavalryman dubbed the ‘First Horseman of Europe’, placed himself at the head of a provisional Tuscan government. He was accompanied by his eighteen-year-old wife of several months, the former Carolina Buonaparte, the first consul’s youngest sister. She was one of three Buonaparte sisters who would enliven the Florentine scene.

Such was the state of affairs that prevailed while the diplomatic settlement over Tuscany was being concluded. The full terms were revealed in the final Franco-Spanish Treaty of Aranjuez (21 March 1801) and in the Franco-Neapolitan Treaty of Florence signed by Murat on 28 March 1801. Grand Duke Ferdinando’s Tuscan possessions were to be confiscated and pass to his neighbours, the Bourbons of Parma, who were to be given royal status and the title of ‘kings of Etruria’.
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Ferdinando was to be compensated from lands seized by the secularization of the archbishopric of Salzburg. The Bourbons of Naples, who had ruled over the
Stato dei Presidii
since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, were required to cede their possession and to withdraw its garrisons. The
Stato dei Presidii
would then be amalgamated with the territory of the dissolved Grand Duchy of Tuscany to create the Kingdom of Etruria, so reuniting historic Tuscany with much of the adjacent coastline.

Despite their elevation to nominal royalty, the Bourbons of Parma cannot have been particularly delighted by this turn of events; their home base in Parma was to be annexed directly to France as the Département de Taro (it was contiguous on its western border with Piedmont, which had already been incorporated). What is more, the duke of Parma was to be passed over in Etruria in favour of his son, Lodovico di Borbone, otherwise known as Louis de Bourbon, who was married to a Spanish cousin and was presumably judged more malleable. The new king’s father, who had paid so heavily to sweeten the French, declined in health and shortly died, no doubt rueing his investment.

The Kingdom of Etruria was the first of Napoleon’s monarchical experiments. All the earlier states and statelets thrown up by the French Revolution, from Batavia to Helvetia, had been republics modelled on the French Republic itself. But by 1801, as first consul for life, Napoleon was free to indulge his own autocratic tendencies. His new attitude was bound up with the growing reaction against republicanism both in France and in Italy, which encouraged him to seek common cause with moderate (and especially with dependent) monarchists. He would continue on this path until in four years he was crowned emperor of the French, and in five, king of Italy.

By public proclamation, Etruria was declared to be a sovereign kingdom, and as such it would receive foreign ambassadors; in reality, it was a client state which paid tribute to France – partly to maintain the French garrison and partly to swell Napoleon’s general war chest. Because of the Bourbon connection, it is sometimes described as belonging to the Spanish dominions, but this is nominally correct at best. It owed everything to its French sponsors. It had been invented by the French, and could be dismantled by the French. As soon as its existence became inconvenient, it would be wiped out at the stroke of a Parisian pen.

Etruria’s king, Lodovico I (or Louis I
^er
d’Étrurie, 1773–1803), was barely twenty-eight years old when handed his kingdom without warning. By royalist standards, his pedigree was impeccable. His father’s family, the Bourbons of Parma, were close relatives of Spain’s ruling house, who called him
El Niño
, ‘The Child’. His mother’s family, the Habsburg-Lorrainers, linked him both to Austria and to the previous rulers of Tuscany. His nineteen-year-old wife, Maria-Luisa di Borbone, was an infanta of Spain. A famous group portrait,
The Family of Charles
IV
, was painted by Goya in 1800–1801. It shows Lodovico and Maria-Luisa holding their baby son and standing in a place of honour immediately behind the Spanish monarch. Whether or not the half-Spanish client of an increasingly autocratic French dictator could gain control over his manufactured Italian realm was open to question.

There was no time for a coronation. On hearing of their good fortune, the king and queen rushed from Spain to Paris in May 1801 to undergo a civilian induction, and no doubt to be given advice and instructions. Napoleon organized two military parades in their honour in front of the Tuileries. The royal couple sat in Napoleon’s box at the Opéra during a performance of Gluck’s
Iphigénie en Aulide
. Commemorative medals were struck, and complimentary verses composed:

La Toscane autrefois nous donna Médicis,

Aujourd’hui la vertu va régner dans Florence.

(‘Tuscany in former times gave us the Medicis, / today in Florence Virtue is going to reign.’) The appearance of a young Bourbon couple so soon after the end of the revolutionary wars could not fail to intrigue Parisians, not least because they were only thinly disguised as the ‘count and countess of Livorno’. They became the talk of the town, and the subject of gossip in the first consul’s entourage, which knew very well that this was ‘Don Louis I of Etruria’ and ‘Maria-Luisa, infanta of Spain’. They made a mixed impression, as the emperor’s chief valet recalled:

The King of Etruria was not fond of work, and… did not please the First Consul, who could not endure idleness. I heard him one day severely score his royal protégé (in his absence of course). ‘Here is a prince,’ he said, ‘who… passes his time cackling to old women, to whom… he complains in a whisper of owing his elevation to the chief of this cursed French Republic…’ ‘It is asserted,’ remarked [an officer of the household to Bonaparte], ‘that you wished to disgust the French people with Kings by showing them such a specimen, as the Spartans disgusted their children with drunkenness by exhibiting to them a drunken slave.’ ‘Not so, my dear sir,’ replied the First Consul, ‘I have no desire to disgust them with royalty, but the sojourn of the King of Etruria will annoy a number of good people, who work incessantly to create a feeling favourable to the Bourbons.’
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