600 Chapter XXV
Few republics of such great significance have been destined to so short a life.
The Cispadane, under its constitution, lasted only three months. By the spring of
1797 the military issue was settled. Bonaparte had pursued the Austrians into
Carinthia and Styria, and caused panic in Vienna itself, where the Bank of Vienna
closed its doors, and crowds demonstrated outside Thugut’s house. Thugut and
Bonaparte called off the hostilities and signed a preliminary peace at Leoben on
April 18, 1797.
Bonaparte was now free to decide what to do about the revolutionary ferment
in north Italy. His decision favored the patriots of Lombardy and the Cispadane,
to the disadvantage of those of Venetia and Piedmont. With hostilities suspended,
he needed no longer to fear the Kingdom of Sardinia in his rear, or to keep it in
check by tolerating revolutionary plots against it. He withdrew all pretense of sup-
port for the republicans of Piedmont. Toward Austria he would pursue no guerre à
outrance, nor demand unconditional surrender as favored by French and Italian
democrats, but would arrange a negotiated peace, with due regard to balance and
compensation, persuading the Austrians to acknowledge the loss of their former
possessions at Milan in return for the acquisition of Venice. Where the Directory,
in 1796, had wished to gain the old Austrian Netherlands and the Rhine frontier
by letting the Austrians keep Milan, Bonaparte in 1797, wanting Milan in addi-
tion, would give them Venetia instead.
The Cisalpine Republic, with its capital at Milan, was promulgated in June
- The Cispadane was dissolved, and its territories merged into the Cisalpine.
But the exclusion of Venice was the price paid for the birth of the Cisalpine.
The Venetian Revolution and the Treaty of Campo Formio
Venice, founded in the fifth century, was the “eldest child of Liberty,” according to
Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Extinction of the Venetian Republic. It was ruled,
however, especially in the eighteenth century, by a group of patricians so exclusive,
so tightly knit, so purely hereditary, so secretive, and so few in number that Dis-
raeli, when he entered British politics in the 1840’s, could make the term “Vene-
tian oligarchy” a by- word for aristocratic Whiggery of the most exaggerated kind.^20
The oldest families, whose fortunes had been established in commerce in earlier
centuries, now usually lived from the incomes of landed estates on the mainland.
The most active men in trade were typically “newcomers,” but the word must be
understood in a relative sense; in a patrician republic where the last doge, Ludovico
Manin, was considered a parvenu because his family had been inscribed in the
Golden Book in 1669, a newcomer might be reasonably well established; and the
“newcomers” and “outsiders,” men of the business, professional, and intellectual
20 For Venice, 27–28; M. Berengo, La società veneta alla fine del Settecento (Florence, 1956); M.
Pettrocchi, Il tramonto della repubblica di Venezia e I’assolutismo illuminato (Venice, 1950); G. B. Mc-
Clellan, Venice and Bonaparte (Princeton, 1931); A. Bozzola, “L’ultimo doge e la caduta della Serenis-
sima” in Nuova rivista storica, XVIII (1934), 30–58; for Verona, R. Fasanari, Gli albori del Risorgimento
a Verona, 1785–1801 (Verona, 1950). See also Candeloro, 232–34; Ghisalberti, 112–18.