590 Chapter XXV
an economic equality to follow upon the abolition of property, the Italian demo-
crats, though some of them were in touch with French Babouvists, were democrats
of a more purely political and constitutional kind. The most vehement of them,
men like Ranza, Custodi, and Salvador, took pains to argue that private property
and some degree of economic inequality were desirable. Buonarroti’s own compan-
ion of 1796, Guglielmo Cerise, died as a baron of the Napoleonic empire.^1
During the excitement of the triennio, even as they became disillusioned with
the French themselves, the Italian revolutionaries were agreed in admiring the
French constitution of 1795. Discussions such as were heard in France of the re-
spective merits of the constitutions of the Year I and the Year III were of little in-
terest to the Italians, for whom the various French constitutions looked much
alike.^2 For the Italy of the Old Regime the constitution of the French Directory
was revolutionary and democratic, and was willingly adopted by Italian Jacobins as
a model.
By 1799 there were five revolutionary republics in Italy, all but one swept away
in the Austro- Russian reaction. They were the Cisalpine, the Ligurian (which
alone survived under French protection), the Luccan, the Roman, and the Nea-
politan—or Parthenopean as the French called it.^3 There is room to treat only the
Cisalpine on the same scale as was used for the Batavian Republic in an earlier
chapter. Absorbing the earlier Cispadane Republic of 1796, and evolving, after the
battle of Ma rengo of 1801, into the Italian Republic and the Napoleonic Kingdom
of Italy, the Cisalpine stands as a prominent landmark both in the spread of revo-
lution in the 1790’s, and in the long process of the modernization of Italy which
we know as the Risorgimento.
The Val Padana and the Bridge at Lodi
Reaching over two hundred miles from Turin to the Adriatic, between the Alps to
the north and the rough range of the Appenines to the south, lay the open expanse
of the Val Padana, the Po valley, the garden of Italy, a land of music and statuary
and dramatic emotions, very different from the sober Dutch provinces, but suscep-
tible to much of the same kind of political renovation. The valley, with the changes
it underwent between 1796 and 1799, is shown by the accompanying pair of maps.
Proceeding downstream from the Kingdom of Sardinia, one passed the region
1 G. Vaccarino, I patrioti “anarchistes” e l ’ idea dell ’unità italiana 1796–99 (Turin, 1955); C. Ghisal-
berti, Le costituzione “giacobine,” 1796–99 (Varese, 1957); G. Spini in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento,
XLIII (1956), 792–96, reviewing D. Cantimori, Giacobini italiani, Vol. 1: Compagnoni, L’Aurora,
Ranza, Galdi, Russo (Bari, 1956), which puts more emphasis on social as distinct from political revolu-
tion. On the use of the word “democratic” in Italy see also p. 549.
2 Ghisalberti, 87–91; G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna (Milan, 1956), finds a preference of
some Italians for the “Jacobin” constitution of the Year I.
3 That it has always been called “Parthenopean” in English, also, shows how much this period in
Italian history has been seen through French eyes in England, and derivatively in America. The An-
nual Register for 1799 called it the Neapolitan Republic; it would be well to return to this original
English usage. Parthenope was the very ancient city on the site of Naples, where Neapolis or the “new
city” was built about 600 B.C.