CHAPTER XXV
THE CISALPINE REPUBLIC
Liberty EqualityIN THE NAME OF THE CISALPINE REPUBLICThe Executive Directory, composed of Citizens Serbelloni, Alessandri, Moscati
and Paradisi, recently installed by the commanding general, Bonaparte, in the
name of the French Republic... has decreed that the same general’s proclamation
of 11 Messidor should be put into its Acts:
PROCLAMATION
Bonaparte, commanding general of the Army of Italy:
The Cisalpine Republic was formerly under the dominion of the House of
Austria. The French Republic succeeded by right of conquest. It renounces that
right from this day forward. The Cisalpine Republic is free and independent....
It remains for the Cisalpine Republic to demonstrate to the world by its wisdom
and energy, and by the good organization of its armies, that modern Italy has not
degenerated and is still worthy of liberty.
Signed: BONAPARTE
Milan, June 1797
The triennio of the Italians began with the irruption of the French in 1796, and
ended in 1799 when the French were driven out by the Austrian and Russian
armies, with some assistance from the Turks, by whose combined efforts, it was
briefly hoped, European civilization in Italy would be saved from the evils of Jaco-
binism. The giacobini called themselves “democrats.” Nowhere else at the time, and
certainly not in the United States, was the word “democracy” so enthusiastically
adopted. Where in France it was the Babeuf group that most freely applied the
term to themselves, and the secretive inner core of the Babouvists understood by it