584 Chapter XXIV
Vinay. The other, more definitely republican, contained a number of medical stu-
dents and doctors, including Carlo Botta, then a doctor, and later famous as a
historian. With the French advances of 1794 (which brought Buonarroti to Oneg-
lia) plans were made for revolt in Turin, but they were discovered by the police,
with help from the British agent in Genoa. The plotters fled or were exiled. Two
years later, in April 1796, as already noted, some of these same men, in touch with
Buonarroti and the Babouvists in Paris, brought on a more successful insurrection
and proclaimed the republic at Alba. But Bonaparte, by signing an armistice with
the Sardinian king, repudiated these revolutionaries and frustrated the republican
movement.
Various other incidents could be recounted. At Rome, where popular demon-
strations against the ungodly French were a common occurrence, the French
envoy, Hugo de Bassville, in the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1793, was imprudent
enough to display an enormous tricolor at the embassy. He was set upon and mur-
dered by angry crowds. The French complained of the poor police protection at
Rome, but did no more than to break diplomatic relations for several years. At
Palermo a plot was discovered to assassinate the archbishop. In Venetia the cities
of the mainland bore the supremacy of Venice with increasing disaffection. At
Padua, for example, nobles, priests, and middle- class citizens, reinforced by profes-
sors and students at the University, were all hostile to La Dominante, as the city of
Venice was called by its mainland subjects.
When the French under Bonaparte in 1796, having defeated Sardinia, poured
down into the Lombard plain, driving the Austrians before them, they met every-
where with little or no resistance. As in Belgium, Holland, and the Rhineland in
1794, so in Italy in 1796, the most notable fact seems to have been that no one
cared to defend the existing order. As in these northern regions two years before,
either the governments were afraid to arm their own peoples, or their feeble at-
tempts to evoke a kind of popular rising against the invaders came to nothing. At
Milan, after the Austrians left, the patricians in the Decurionate enrolled a few
volunteer defenders, but as one of them remarked, the people could not become
very animated without il nome di patria, and there was not much for most Mila-
nese to feel patriotic about.^37 When the French soon thereafter passed on into
Venetia, the British representative there dreaded the approach of “the absolute De-
mocracy,” and remarked to Lord Grenville: “I may add that the Venetian nobles
during this whole contest have improvidently distrusted their own subjects, and
have been afraid of allowing them the use of arms to protect themselves.”^38
So the Revolution came to Italy. Cacault thought the Italians more receptive
to the French and more suited for liberty than “the stupid Belgians or brutalized
Germans.”^39 It remained to be seen how long the welcome to the French would
last.
37 C. Montalcini, Atti delle assemblee costituzionali italiane... Republica cisalpina, 10 vols. (Bolo-
gna, 1917–1943), I, xci.
38 C. Roth, “La caduta della serenissima nei dispacci del residente inglese a Venezia,” in Archivio
veneto (1935), 188, 211.
39 Quoted by Candeloro, Storia, 190.