The Revolution Comes to Italy 575
immediately, ferreted out Babouvists in France, ordered Blauw and Valckenaer out
of Paris, rescinded its instructions to Poteratz, and became suspicious of the Italian
refugees. The recall of Mangourit from Spain was a move in the same direction.
In general, after the discovery of the Babeuf conspiracy, the Directory, in its at-
titude to revolution in foreign countries, showed less inclination to deal with refu-
gees and fiery individual patriots and more of a tendency to think in military
terms, and to appeal to settled middle- class persons, who, in various countries,
would never make a revolution themselves but might accept a revolutionary re-
gime after the arrival of the French army. In the Batavian Republic, the French,
while continuing to favor the unitary democrats, tried to avoid offending the more
moderate federalists. The Poles were channeled into the organized Polish Legion,
under Bonaparte’s command. In the plans for Ireland, arranged with Wolfe Tone,
internal agitation was subordinated to the great naval expedition which sailed for
Bantry Bay in December 1796, and which failed to land 15,000 troops in Ireland
only because of unfavorable winds.
As for the Italians, the view prevailed which Cacault had already expressed be-
fore the Babeuf- Buonarroti conspiracy was discovered. His view was shared by
most French observers in Italy, including Bonaparte. It held that broad segments
of Italian opinion were dissatisfied with the existing order, would welcome the
French, and collaborate in a revolution under French protection, but that little
clusters of visionary exiles, fugitives, conspirators, and radical intellectuals, like Bu-
onarroti, representing no actual forces in their own countries, would do more harm
than good.
“It is not to be doubted,” wrote Cacault to Delacroix on April 9, “that when our
military forces triumph in Piedmont we can rally these [locally resident] patriots
and many others; I believe that in working by a reasonable method to Republican-
ize the conquered areas in Italy we can obtain advantages, and especially inspire
fear and terror in the hearts of all the petty Tyrants by whom this fair country is
subjected; but I have never proposed this except as secondary to our victories....
Let us enter victoriously into Piedmont, the Milanese and all Italy; we shall find a
high- spirited people, and can then use the refugees who have any virtues or char-
acter—the number is not large.... The notes on Italy signed by Buonarroti and
Cerise are pitiful... .”^21
It is argued by some historians that the Directory turned against the Italian
revolutionaries of the type of Buonarroti because it was afraid of them. Their im-
plication with Babeuf and preference for a united Italy to be achieved by a vast
popular rising or levée révolutionnaire, are thought to have stirred up in the minds
of Delacroix and the Directors a kind of general bourgeois social fear. It is even
argued that this fear on the part of the Directory prevented a unification of Italy
that was perhaps possible in the 1790’s.^22
21 Saitta, II, 22.
22 Godechot, La Grande Nation: l ’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde 1789–99, 2
vols. (Paris, 1956), I, 284–311, which restates a thesis set forth in numerous articles, especially “Unità
batava e unità italiana all’epoca del Direttorio,” in Archivio storico italiano, CXIII (1955), 335–56.
Saitta, Candeloro, and some others of the best recent Italian historians also attributed the turning of
the French Directory against the Italian unitarists to the fear of radicalism aroused by discovery of the