604 Chapter XXV
It was put together from territories formerly belonging to six different jurisdic-
tions: the duchies of Milan, Mantua and Modena, the northern part of the Papal
States, western Venetia, and the region known as the Valtellina, the upper valley of
the Adda above Lake Como, which had long been dependent on the Dreibünde in
Switzerland, and where, as elsewhere, a “revolution” occurred in 1797. The new re-
public brought together men who had had no habits of working together, and so,
like the Cispadane, marked the beginning of a unifying experience. The popular
club at Milan became a forum for the most vehement and the most visionary pa-
triots from all Italy. Some five or six hundred from Rome and southern Italy vis-
ited Milan in these years. To Milan also came, as refugees, the Venetian revolution-
aries who felt they had been betrayed, and others in flight from the Kingdom of
Sardinia, where their attempts at revolution, breaking out at Asti, Novara, and
elsewhere in 1797, had been ignored by the French and suppressed by the royal
Sardinian government. The Cisalpine was a cockpit of republican politics, in which
some were satisfied with the new arrangement, others eager to go immediately
beyond it, some willing to work constructively with the French, others suspicious
of the French as mere self- seeking and cynical moderates.
The Cisalpine constitution, drafted by an Italian committee, was proclaimed by
Bonaparte in the name of the French Republic. It resembled the French constitu-
tion of 1795, but it also reproduced much of the Cispadane constitution which it
replaced, and which had been written by a constituent assembly of Italians work-
ing in relative freedom from external pressure; and most of the recent Italian his-
torians, differing from their nineteenth century predecessors who found it impor-
tant to dwell on national differences, agree that the Cisalpine constitution was not
in a meaningful sense “imposed” by the French. If imposed, it was imposed by
modern- minded Italians, making use of the occupying authority of the French,
upon their own more conservative countrymen.
The document began with the usual declaration of rights, and with a regrouping
of the miscellaneous territories into homogeneous “departments,” which reached
twenty in number by the end of 1797. It set up a legislative body of two elective
chambers, which came to be called the Seniori and the Juniori, and an Executive
Directory of five persons to be elected by the two chambers. Other clauses dealt
with local government, the judiciary, the armed forces, finances, and public instruc-
tion. To smooth the transition from provisional to settled rule, and from obvious
French control to a regime that was at least in principle independent, Bonaparte
himself, upon orders from Paris, appointed the first members of the Cisalpine Di-
rectory and of the two chambers. The Italians chosen for these positions included
both moderates and democrats, and were purposely drawn from various regions
within the new state.^26
The constitution had a troubled history, as will be seen, and most of what the
new Cisalpine authorities attempted was swept away in 1799. It was only in the
of the most enlightening works ever written on the subject were produced in the 1920’s: E. Rota, Gi-
useppe Poggi e la formazione psicologica del patrioto moderno, 1761–1843 (Piacenza, 1923), available also
as a series of articles in Nuova rivista storica, 1922 and 1923; and C. Morandi, Idee e formazione politiche
in Lombardia dal 1748 al 1814 (Turin, 1927).
26 Aquarone, 83–153; Ghisalberti, 116–18, 129–34.