The Cisalpine Republic 601
classes, who became “democrats” (which to say anti- aristocrats) at Venice as in
other Italian cities, were by no means merely transients. There were many such
democrats in the city of Venice itself. Since the Republic was organized on the old
city- state principle, with the cities of the mainland having no part whatever in its
affairs, the mainland cities were somewhat ill- disposed toward the Queen of the
Adriatic. In these places also there were “democrats,” who might be patricians of
their own cities, or middle class people, or priests, or Jews. The actual lower classes,
such as servants, water carriers, or gondoliers, and the mass of the rural people,
remained either conservative or indifferent.
The rulers of Venice tried desperately to remain neutral in the war that began in
- It was difficult for them to get their neutrality respected, especially since
they had no armed forces beyond a few Dalmatian mercenaries, whom they did
not trust. Any step that they took gave offense to someone, as when they allowed
“Louis XVIII” to settle at Verona. The French invasion of the Po valley in 1796
made neutrality even more precarious, since the Austrians could not operate at all,
nor the French pursue them, without touching on territory of the Venetian Re-
public, which reached to within twenty miles of Milan. Indeed the Austrians had
already signed with the Russians, before the French invasion, an agreement by
which Austria should annex the Most Serene Republic to the Hapsburg empire.
Revolutions against Venice broke out at Brescia and Bergamo as the French ap-
proached. Provisional governments were instituted. After a revolt at Verona against
the French, and after an unpleasant incident at Venice itself, where the appearance
of a French naval vessel at this supposedly neutral port had met with hostile dem-
onstrations; Bonaparte ordered the occupation of all the mainland cities, and sent
an ultimatum to Venice, in which he demanded its immediate “democratization .”
By this he chiefly meant, as did many more genuine democrats, the displacement
of the small governing and privileged class.
There were a good many even among the Venetian nobles, as the patricians of
the city were called, who had come to believe that there was no future for their
venerable republic in its existing form, and who therefore either sank into apathy,
or waited with resignation for their fate to be decided by foreigners, or in some
cases were excited by the changes that were beginning in the Po valley. “An im-
mense quantity of French cockades” was discovered in the houses of two noblemen
who had just returned from a trip to Milan.^21 The formation of the Cispadane
Republic was watched with interest. After the the revolts at Brescia and Bergamo,
which declaied themselves to be “republics” independent of Venice, and where the
patriots really preferred union with the yet unborn Cisalpine, a Venetian noble
spoke up in the Senate for “voluntary democratization.” He declared that Venice
should at last join with its own mainland dependencies on an equal basis, and that
it was impossible to “maintain a pure but discredited Aristocracy in the face of the
new democratic Italian government,” by which he meant the governments taking
form in Lombardy and Emilia.^22 But the Senate refused to admit even the main-
21 C. Roth, “La caduta della Serenissima nei dispacci del residente inglese a Venezia” in Archivio
Ve neto, 5th ser. (1935), 193.
22 Bozzola, 43, quoting a speech of Gabriel Marcello.