The Cisalpine Republic 593
troops felt more zeal for the Republic than the French armies along the Rhine, but
they had little respect for the civilian chatterboxes in Paris, as they would call
them, and in fact Bonaparte, with such an army, was able to become virtually inde-
pendent, to upset the foreign policy of the Directory, and especially at the time of
the Fructidor coup d’état to make the civilian government dependent upon him-
self. In Italy, also, his personal aura suffused the political atmosphere. Italian revo-
lutionaries could act successfully only within the limits of his aims and needs. It so
happened that he desired their co- operation.
“The battle of the bridge at Lodi,” a leading modern Italian historian has writ-
ten, “imposed on all actors on the political stage the problem of the democratiza-
tion of Italy.”^5
In the following year the whole Po valley came to a boil, but it was for some
time uncertain what would be crystallized from the swirling mixture. The irreduc-
ible elements were the cities. What happened, characteristically, in city after city,
upon the arrival or merely the approach of the French, was that locally dissatisfied
persons, who had been agitating since 1789—journalists, lawyers, doctors, univer-
sity professors and students, merchants in the newer trades, landowners of modern
outlook, outsiders and newcomers not ancestrally identified with civic affairs, rein-
forced by a good many nobles and priests—upset and replaced the older municipal
oligarchies, the Senate at Bologna, the Decurions at Milan, the Centumviri at Fer-
rara. Each new group made its own arrangements with the French army. Many
sent their own separate deputations to Paris.
Questions of territory and boundaries became fluid. Only at Venice and Genoa
(for by 1797 the revolution spread beyond the valley to these historic centers) did
the new provisional governments claim to represent the whole territory of pre-
existing states. Elsewhere all was in flux. Padua and Brescia were in revolt against
Venice, Bologna and Ferrara against the Pope, Modena and Reggio against their
duke, Asti and Novara against the king of Sardinia. In such places the local leaders
of revolution, committed to no kind of political unit except their own city, tended
to league together for mutual protection. Or from a kind of municipal jealousy, or
fear of being overshadowed by immediate neighbors, they imagined a single large
Italian state in which all might merge. Thus the idea of a united Italy grew from
local roots. But the same purpose might be served by new states of intermediate
size. The visible units of the cities, each with its bit of surrounding country, were
re- combined into larger entities, though their fates were different. By the end of
1797 Venice and most of the Venetian cities had become a province of Austria, the
Sardinian towns remained in that kingdom, and the ancient city- state of Genoa
had been revolutionized into the Ligurian Republic. The cities of Lombardy and
Emilia, each with its contado, had fused into a republic, subdivided into uniform
departimenti, as in France.
The Italians, like the Dutch, had to pay for their liberation, or rather for the
protection of the French army under which they undertook to liberate themselves.
For the French, whose immediate problem was the military one against Austria, it
would be enough to keep control by a military administration or temporary occu-
5 Ghisalberti, 100.