The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796

Deliverance, 1796–9 Soldiers . . . Your fatherland has the right to expect great things of you. Will you live up to its expectations? You still have battles to fight, towns to capture and rivers to pass. Everyone is burning to carry the glory of the French people far and wide. Everyone is eager to impose a glorious peace. Everyone wishes to be able to return to their village and say with pride: ‘I was in the army that conquered Italy!’ My friends, I promise you this conquest; but . . . you must respect the people you are delivering . . . People of Italy, the French army is coming to break your chains. Meet it with confidence.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, proclamation to the Army of Italy, 26 April 1796

But where will I find refuge? In Italy? A prostituted land, forever the prize of victory. Will I be able to face those who have despoiled, derided and sold us without weeping with anger? Destroyers of peoples, who make use of liberty in the same way as the popes made use of the crusades. Oh! I have often wished to plunge a knife in my heart, in despair at being able to avenge myself, and shed all my blood amid the last cries of my fatherland!
—Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)

The Arrival of Napoleon On Sunday, 15 May 1796, the feast of Pentecost, Napoleon Bonaparte entered Milan in triumph. In the space of a little over a month his ill-equipped army of some 30,000 men had secured a series of lightning victories over the Piedmontese and Austrians, and now the whole of northern and central Italy lay open before him. Quite what he intended to do with the newly conquered territories was far from clear, and many of those who turned out in the late spring sunshine to watch the French troops filing through the streets of the city must have experienced a good deal of uncertainty and dread as well as excitement. The French authorities had announced ahead of the invasion that Napoleon was coming to set ‘the peoples of Italy’ free and to ‘break their chains’; and Napoleon himself had promised the Milanese that their city would become the capital of a republic stretching from sea to sea, enjoying the ‘eternal friendship of France’. But there could be no guarantee that such promises would be kept.
Among those watching the ragged French troops filing into Milan was an elderly economist, Pietro Verri. Verri had been a leading figure in the movement to introduce reforms that had swept through most of the Italian states in the 1760s and 1770s. Like many fellow intellectuals, Verri had grown increasingly disillusioned at the slow pace of change and disenchanted with princely governments, and had retired from public life in 1786. The outbreak of the French Revolution had rekindled his hopes. Observing the French soldiers, he was conscious of a raw energy – an energy rooted, he felt, in the self-confidence that came from their feeling of belonging to a ‘nation’, and which more than compensated for their lack of equipment and their indiscipline:

They marched in disorderly fashion, and were dressed in tattered uniforms of different colours. Some had no arms, and therewas very little artillery. Their horses were weak and scrawny. When mounting guard, they sat down. They looked not so much like an army as a population that has brazenly sallied out from its town to invade the surrounding neighbourhood. Tactics, discipline and skill were constantly subordinate to the national commitment of a people fighting for themselves against [the Austrian] automata, who were fighting from fear of punishment.

Verri’s admiration for the French troops arriving in Milan was shared by his friend the distinguished choreographer and dancer Gasparo Angiolini. Angiolini had been born into a theatrical family in Florence in 1731, and like many talented Italian artists of his generation had decided as a young man to leave the provincial confines of his home city and try his luck in the courts of northern Europe. After a decade of travels, he had risen to become director of ballet at the Imperial Theatre in Vienna, where he had worked closely with the great opera composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck, developing the dramatic narrative style known as ballet d’action. In 1766 he had moved to St Petersburg to take over from the illustrious Austrian choreographer Franz Hilverding, at the Imperial Theatre. Laden with honours and pensions, he had returned to his native country in 1778 and had taken up the post of choreographer at the theatre of La Scala in Milan. His villa, Malgacciata, outside the city, was frequented by such luminaries as the poet Giuseppe Parini and the jurist Cesare Beccaria.
Living and working abroad, often alongside Italians from other parts of Italy, Angioolini had developed a strong sense of belonging to a great cultural nation. But he had also grown aware that Italy had lost its former pre- eminence in the arts and was now languishing behind the rest of Europe. This was a view that had become widely shared by the middle years of the century, with Italian and foreign commentators frequently reaching for metaphors of ‘sleep’ and ‘waking’ to describe the situation. The distinguished Venetian philosopher and art critic Count Francesco Algarotti had written from Berlin in 1752 of how Italy had once ‘opened the eyes’ of other nations and led them out of barbarism; but now it was ‘taking a little nap’. He was saddened by this state of affairs, but philosophical: ‘Let us be consoled by our past achievements . . . Other nations now dominate; but we were ourselves once dominant.’ Algarotti’s sense of resignation was not uncommon at the time; but from the 1760s a mood of mounting frustration had begun to set in among educated Italians. If Italy was sleeping, then it had to be woken, forcibly if necessary, in order to catch up with other countries. Amid the imperial splendours of St Petersburg, Gasparo Angiolini (whose compatriots in the city included Bartolomeo Rastrelli, architect of many of St Petersburg’s finest buildings, including the Winter Palace) had become infected with this new, more aggressive mood, and in a celebrated polemic he had written of how it was ‘humiliating for every good Italian’ that in the north of Europe dance and theatre had soared to heights of excellence, while in Italy, once ‘mistress of all learning’, productions were being staged that ‘disgraced’ and ‘shamed’ her. But he was confident that there would soon be a revival: ‘In every age Italy has had its Cimabues . . . its Dantes, its Pico della Mirandolas and its Galileos, the leading figures and most outstanding talents in every sphere, who have restored the arts and the sciences.’ Angiolini was deeply excited by the arrival of Napoleon and the French in Milan in May 1796. It seemed to him, as to many other educated men and women who over the preceding decades had absorbed the Enlightenment ideals of moral and material progress, to herald a new era of freedom and regeneration for both the city and Italy. And he hurried to show his enthusiasm for the revolutionary order, constructing a curious tree of liberty in front of his villa of Malgacciata: a massive oak with a Phrygian bonnet of polished bronze tied to its top-most branch, and two enormous sails of canvas hanging below that swelled and flapped in the wind. Angiolini had a similar tree of liberty set up in the piazza of a nearby village, summoned the local peasants and delivered a speech to them about the importance of what was taking place. Their response, it seems, was one of intense bemusement and anger.
Milan must have seemed to Angiolini in the next three years a vibrant city – the city ‘awoken from its slumbers’ described by the great French romantic writer Stendhal in the opening pages of his novel The Charterhouse of Parma, where the height of ambition was no longer ‘to print sonnets upon little handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta on the occasion of the marriage of some young lady belonging to a rich and noble family’, but altruistically to serve ‘the nation’. Though ill and gout-ridden, Angiolini put his wealth and considerable talents at the disposal of the new regime, hoping to spread the gospel of revolution to the people. He produced pamphlets and jotted his political thoughts down in notebooks, which he had printed and distributed to his friends. He became involved in the setting up of the National Theatre, and almost certainly contributed to the production of such popular (and educational) musical dramas as The Dream of a Democrat, The Republican and Silvio, or the True Patriot. But his revolutionary ardour was in due course to cost him dear.