The Cisalpine Republic 597
Patriotic feeling ran high at Milan, the more so since the Austrians were not yet
really defeated. When Wurmser, regrouping his forces, began a counter- offensive,
audiences in the theater sang the Marseillaise. In November there was an uprising
in the city, when the patriots, after a great demonstration at a tree of liberty before
the cathedral, solemnly proclaimed the independence of Lombardy and demanded
elections for “primary assemblies.” What they wanted, in short, was a constituent
assembly to establish a republic. The uprising was suppressed by the French Army.
With military operations still in progress in the Milanese, neither Bonaparte nor
the Directory was yet ready to countenance a republic north of the Po.
South of the river the situation was different, and the first Italian republic to be
constructed along modern lines was therefore the Cispadane.
The Cispadane Republic
The Papal States extended from the mouth of the Po to a point south of Rome,
and the men who controlled the affairs of the Church were well aware that the
best of Catholics saw nothing sacred in this temporal power. The Austrians or the
King of Naples, or both in concert, might someday annex or partition these terri-
tories of the Church; but in 1796 the danger seemed most imminent from the
French. The Pope maintained no actual army, but after the battle of Lodi the
Curia, optimistically expecting a successful counter- attack by the Austrians, took
steps to raise a kind of levée en masse, in which it had no more success than other
governments of the Old Regime. The only effect was to provide the French with
another excuse for intervention, and they entered Bologna on June 18,1796.
At Bologna, it may be recalled, there had been an unsuccessful conspiracy led by
Zamboni in 1794. The trial had dragged on, and Zamboni’s father had died in
prison, and an accomplice had been executed, only two months before the French
arrived.^15 There was much restlessness in the city, so that many welcomed the in-
vaders gladly, and complied eagerly with the French demand that Bologna break
off from the Papal States. A dispute developed between the Senate of Bologna and
those who complained of its closed and oligarchical character. Both were eager to
throw off the papal overlordship and restore communal independence, but the
Senate took the view that independence, or “liberty,” should leave its old position
and privileges unimpaired. Somewhat the same question, between constituted
bodies and new men, had of course arisen in many other connections—in the
Dutch revolt against the House of Orange, the aristocratic revolt against the mon-
archy in France, and even in the rebellion of Massachusetts against the British
Parliament in 1775.^16
A committee drafted a constitution for a “Bologna republic.” It began with a
declaration of rights, virtually a translation of the French Declaration of 1789. The
body of the Constitution, putting sovereignty in the “universality of the citizens,”
15 Candeloro, 187–88; L. Frati, Il Settecento a Bologna (n.p., 1923), 246–47. In 1798 the remains
of Zamboni and his accomplice, De Rolandis, were placed in a civic urn at the foot of a liberty tree; in
1799 they were scattered to the winds.
16 Above, pp. 536, 565, 583, 584.