The Cisalpine Republic 595
Italian revolution in which the errors and horrors of the French Revolution were
avoided, the faults of the French were hardly relevant to the real questions. Nor did
the depredations in Italy seem shocking to the democratically minded in America,
who saw Bonaparte at this time as a Republican hero and the campaign in Italy as
a Republican crusade. Andrew Jackson, thirty years before the advent of “Jackso-
nian democracy,” hoped that Bonaparte would proceed next to England and set up
a free republic there.^10
It may also be noted that the Italians of the triennio felt a strong affinity for the
American Revolution.^11 They thought that it had opened an era, leading on to the
French Revolution which was now leading to the Italian. Works by Benjamin
Franklin were translated and published at both Turin and Venice in 1797. At Ven-
ice, his Poor Richard was included in the same volume with the Pennsylvania con-
stitution of 1776. The Americans, said the Venetian translator, “were the first to
philosophize on the true spirit and advantages of liberty.” At Bologna, at the “Cir-
colo costituzionale del Genio democratico,” late in 1797, the chairman of the
meeting lauded the Americans as predecessors in the search for reason and liberty.
Two Italians very active in revolutionary politics of the triennio, Carlo Botta and
Giuseppe Compagnoni, wrote long histories of America and the American Revo-
lution in their later years. Compagnoni, whose other achievements included the
introduction of the Italian tricolor and the first professorship of constitutional law
in a European university (at Ferrara in 1797), may indeed have written the longest
history of America ever composed by a single man, since his work on the subject
extended to twenty- nine volumes.^12
The French, as already said, entered Milan four days after the battle of Lodi.
Some of the patrician liberals and reformers, Melzi d’Eril, Serbelloni, Pietro Verri,
came out to welcome and work with them. Several hundred more middle- class
people formed a political club, the Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality,
whose troubled existence reflected the changing reactions of the French to Italian
revolutionary pressures: soon closed down for its radicalism, it re- opened as the
Academy of Literature and Public Instruction, was again closed down, and reap-
peared again in 1798 as a Constitutional Circle, the name used in France for the
revived “Jacobin” clubs of the period between the Fructidor and Floréal coups
d’état.^13 Throughout these successive forms the Milan club remained essentially
10 Andrew Jackson remarked to James Robertson (Philadelphia, January 11, 1798) that if the
French succeeded in an invasion of England “tyranny will be humbled, a throne crushed, and a repub-
lic spring from the wreck, and millions of distressed people restored to the rights of man by the con-
quering arm of Bonaparte.” Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 7 vols. (Washington, 1926), I, 42.
11 L. S. Mayo, Beniamino FrankJin 1706–90 (Florence, n.d.) with the preface by Luigi Rava, “La
fortuna di Beniamino Franklin in Italia”; A. Pace, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia, 1958)
Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 47.
12 G. Compagnoni, Storia dell’America, 29 vols. (Milan, 1820–1823), reviewed in North American
Review, X XVII (1828), 30 ff. The work deals with both North and South America. For a full bibliog-
raphy on the origins of the Italian tricolor and on the first chair in constitutional law, see C. Zaghi,
“Guiseppe Compagnoni deputato al Congresso Cispadano e al General Bonaparte,” Nuovi problemi di
politico, storia ed economica, IV (1933), 3–48. On Compagnoni see also D. Cantimori, Giacobini ital-
iani: Compagnoni, L’Aurora, Ranza, Galdi, Russo (Bari, 1956).
13 The vicissitudes of the club, noted in all the general histories, are conveniently explained by B.
Peroni, “La ‘societa popolare’ di Milano, 1796–99” in Rivista storica italiana, LXVI (1954), 511–17.