594 Chapter XXV
pying authority. Such was the preferred program of the Directory in 1796. It was
the strength of the native Italian movement that persuaded Bonaparte otherwise.
He was a mixture of the dreamer and adventurer, the genuine believer in modern-
izing principles of the Enlightenment, and the realist accustomed to a careful
weighing of political forces as he saw them. He concluded that it was in his own
interest, in the interest of France, and of the war against Austria and Great Britain,
to let the Italian patriots, within limits, have their way with new republics and
constitutions. In return, they had to pay—liberté et réquisitions.^6
The French army was supplied. Bonaparte, a few other officers, and various army
contractors made large private fortunes. So abundant was precious metal that the
Armée d ’Italie, alone among French armies, received its wages in hard coin; here
was at least one reason for its especial devotion to its commander and to the Re-
public.^7 By the end of 1796 the French had officially received the equivalent of
45,000,000 francs in Italy in cash and goods, plus some 12,000,000 in gold and
silver plate, ingots and jewelry from the monti di pietà, which were lending institu-
tions where the owners of such valuables left them as collateral.^8
It is hard to estimate the real impact on the populations of requisitions ex-
pressed in abstract terms of large sums of money. It sounds ominous to hear that
the French levied 12,000,000 lire on the duchy of Modena, until we learn that the
duke quickly raised 24,000,000 and decamped with the whole amount.^9 The “loot-
ing” of Italy provided hair- raising narratives for anti- revolutionaries throughout
Europe and the United States. It diminished the need of Italians to feel gratitude
to their liberators, but the wiser ones knew that the costs of defeating Austria must
be somehow shared, and the faith of democrats was by no means wholly under-
mined. Since they had not meant to imitate the French anyway, but to have an
6 On the contradictions in a policy of liberté et réquisitions see especially J. Godechot, Les commis-
saires aux armées sous le Directoire: contribution à l ’ étude des rapports entre Ies pouvoirs civils et militaires,
2 vols. (Paris, 1937), I, 284 ff., and his La Grande Nation, 2 vols. (Paris, 1956), II, 539–65 and 688–90.
Godechot, as a Frenchman trying to be fair and objective, seems if anything more severe than is neces-
sary in judging the behavior of the French at this time. The Italians, like the Dutch, were able to pay
for their own “liberation”; the success of their revolutions was entirely dependent on the defeat of the
Coalition, and there was no good reason, from their own point of view, why they should not contribute
to the common war effort. It was the arbitrary and disorderly character of much requisitioning, and
the private corruption and self- enrichment by the French, that were a ground for legitimate com-
plaint. Godechot, while noting the impossibility of a reliable estimate, concludes (Grande Nation, II,
565) that in the eight years 1792–1799 the French levied at least 360,000,000 francs in the occupied
countries. To give an idea of the meaning of this figure, he remarks that a sum of 360,000,000 was
somewhat over half the French annual budget in the 1790’s, and compares it to the five billion francs
levied by the Germans upon France in 1871, a sum at that time double the French annual budget. He
might also have compared it to the 700,000,000 francs levied as an indemnity upon France in 1815.
Or the 360,000,000 taken by the French may be compared, for size at least, to the £10,000,000 (about
250,000,000 francs) given by the British as subsidies to Continental allies from 1793 to 1800. See the
references in Chapter X XII, note 9, above.
7 Godechot, Commissaires, I, 295.
8 Ibid., I, 572–73.
9 Ibid., I, 428. The economist Melchior Gioia, in I francesi, i tedeschi e i russi in Lombardia (3rd ed.,
Milan, 1805) argued that the burden of the thirteen- month Austro- Russian occupation of 1799–1800
was much heavier than that of the Franco- Cisalpine in requisitions, confiscations, tax levies, and
public disorder.