The Revolution Comes to Italy 583
against the French church reorganization in 1791, the Italian Jansenists tended to
divide. These Jansenists, to repeat, were often men of importance in the govern-
ments and universities. Some now made their peace with Rome. Others, continu-
ing to favor a secularization of church properties, and to admire certain features of
the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy, concluded that such aims could be
achieved in Italy only through revolution, and hence through co- operation with
the French.
Meanwhile, before 1796, all Italy began to vibrate with clubs, conspiracies, and
agitations in which unknown and lesser persons were active.^36 Masonic lodges,
long condemned by the papacy, and now also frowned upon by governments, in
some cases turned into secret revolutionary organizations. They drew assistance
from the Masonic lodge at Marseilles. Filippo Buonarroti, a graduate of the Uni-
versity of Pisa, in 1790 passed over to Corsica, which being French was already
in the turmoil of revolution, and published his Giornale patriottico della Corsica,
the first revolutionary journal in the Italian language. The year 1794 found him
as agent of the Revolutionary Government at Oneglia, an enclave belonging to
the King of Sardinia within the borders of the Republic of Genoa. With the aid
of Tilly, the French envoy in neutral Genoa, various Italians congregated at
Oneglia and received lessons in revolution from Buonarroti. How Buonarroti
subsequently met Babeuf, and developed further plans for revolution, has already
been told.
In 1794 revolutionary plots were discovered at Naples, Bologna, and Turin. The
one at Naples dated back at least to 1792, when a French naval squadron had vis-
ited the city, and after much fraternization between local patriots and French sail-
ors and officers, two revolutionary societies had been formed. Various noblemen,
annoyed at the peculiar influence of the British Sir John Acton over the queen,
were involved. The arrests and trials of 1794 were followed by a continuing harass-
ment of republicans until the French army itself arrived in 1799. At Bologna,
which belonged to the papal states, a young man named Zamboni, who had trav-
eled in Corsica and France, planned an insurrection to obtain independence for
Bologna from the Pope’s government. The plan was discovered; Zamboni commit-
ted suicide in prison, and his father, whom he had drawn into the conspiracy, died
in prison after torture.
Turin and the whole Kingdom of Sardinia had been seriously torn by the war
which the King entered against France in the summer of 1792, after rejecting
French offers of alliance at that time. There was much sympathy for the French
Revolution; indeed, the French- speaking population of Savoy, the oldest part of
this miscellaneous monarchy, voted itself into union with the French Republic late
in 1792, in a plebiscite whose authenticity was not much questioned. In the next
year, while the government managed to stay in the war with a grant of £200,000
from Britain, two revolutionary clubs were organized at Turin, with assistance
from Tilly at Genoa. One, more moderate, was formed around a banker named
and the French Revolution,” in Journal of Central European Affairs, XVIII (1958); C. Morandi, Idee e
formazioni politiche in Lombardia dal 1748 al 1814 (Turin, 1927).
36 A synopsis in Candeloro, Storia, I, 180–197; the special studies are numerous.