598 Chapter XXV
and mapping out legislative, executive, and judiciary powers in quite modern style,
was more specifically adapted to the situation at Bologna, since it represented
something of a compromise between the two parties in the city. It reflected also
the historic municipalism, in the sense of predominance of town over country: the
city of Bologna, with a third of the population, was to receive three- quarters of the
representation. This Bologna constitution of 1796 is regarded as the first constitu-
tion of the Italian Risorgimento, and was in any case the first such written docu-
ment to be officially drafted in Italy.^17
There were revolts also at Ferrara in the Papal States, and at Modena and Reg-
gio in the duchy of Modena. The patricians at Ferrara, the Centumviri, tried to
keep control, but Bonaparte’s civilian associate, Saliceti, out- maneuvered them by
setting up a Ferrara Central Administration in which ordinary borghesi were in-
cluded. It was the French also who brought the four towns together, with assis-
tance from the more “radical” or “democratic” of their citizens, those, that is, who
were the least identified with the aristocracies of the several municipalities. A con-
gress of the four towns, in October 1796, organized a league for common defense
against counter- revolution, not unlike the old leagues of Communes in the Middle
Ages. Bonaparte and Saliceti concluded, however, that it would be more practical
for them to work through some kind of organized territory; and the more enter-
prising patriots from the four cities desired more than a mere league to serve the
purposes of the French. A second congress met at Reggio in December. It was the
first elected assembly of the triennio, and its 110 members, many of whom were to
serve in later years in the Cisalpine Republic and Napoleonic Empire, came mostly
from the business, professional, and landowning middle class, but included several
priests and a few nobles. There was also a Jew among them, whose presence signi-
fied the new order. After a dispute on vote by head or by stato (which in this case
meant by city), a problem which both the French Estates General and the Phila-
delphia Convention had had to face, it was decided that voting should go by head.
The decision favored the democrats, and the Congress proclaimed, under
Bonaparte’s urgings, the Cispadane Republic One and Indivisible.^18 “Indivisibility”
meant, as in the Batavian Republic, that the new state should not disintegrate into
municipal units, since an emphasis on municipalism, federalism, or decentraliza-
tion would leave the old patriciates in positions of influence. It was therefore the
democrats, as elsewhere in Europe but in contrast to the United States, who de-
17 The Bologna constitution is printed by A. Aquarone, et al., eds., Le costituzioni italiane (Milan,
1958), 8–33, as the first modern Italian constitution. The Corsican constitution of 1794 (see above, p.
586), included by the editors in their appendix, was “modern” in a different way, and less truly Italian.
For the revolution at Bologna see Candeloro, 220–22, and Ghisalberti, 104–8.
18 On the formation of the Cispadane see Candeloro, 222–28, and Ghisalberti, 108–12; the latter
indicates the sources and special studies. Where older writers of more nationalistic or conservative
outlook saw the unification of Italy as a thing- in- itself, or supreme and conscious goal of those who
effected it, the modern writers see it more as a byproduct of democratic or other revolutionary aims.
Local democrats, in this view, having in each case to overcome the opposition of their local oligar-
chies, reached out to join forces with those of neighboring places, thus building up political com-
munities of increasingly wider scope. As long ago as the Fascist period Carlo Morandi, in an excel-
lent book, Idee e formazione politiche in Lombardia dal 1748 al 1814 (Turin, 1927), argued that the
desire for Italian political unity was thus mainly a result of democratic developments.