The Cisalpine Republic 605
years after 1801 that their ideas began to be institutionalized, only to be again
partly reversed in the reaction after 1814. The legislation of the Cisalpine Republic
is therefore to be understood, not as a body of achievements, but as the sketch or
design for a new regime, showing what the revolution in Italy during the triennio
was about.
The Cisalpine period, both before and after the promulgation of the constitu-
tion, was a time of rapid development of public opinion and political conscious-
ness, such as Italy had hardly seen since the invention of printing. In contrast to
the Old Regime, freedom of the press was at least the rule, and censorship the ex-
ception. Ideas made familiar by the Enlightenment were now regarded as matters
for action. There were many political journals, which have become very rare even in
Italy. Their names suggest the heated political atmosphere in which they were
written: the Termometro politico, the Giornale repubblicano di Pubblica Istruzione, the
Genio democratico, the Estensore Cisalpina, and the Repubblicano Evangelico (or
“Gospel Republican”), edited by the Parma Jansenist Poggi in refuge at Milan.^27
There were also a good many polemical pamphlets, such as one of 1796 with the
revealing title, Il Risorgimento della oppresa democratia.^28 Its proposals were moder-
ate and specific: that taxes should be borne by property owners, that measures
should be taken to improve agriculture, that international commercial companies
should be encouraged, and a “useful” liberty of the press allowed.
Nobility was abolished, with all its titles, ranks, and display of heraldic emblems,
along with an array of other practices that had become shocking to enlightened
and humane sentiment. Torture disappeared from the law- courts. The opera and
the churches were forbidden to use evirati cantori, the emasculated tenors that a
somewhat baroque taste had made peculiar to Italy.
Steps were taken to create an army.^29 The Italians formerly under Austria, like
those of the former papal legations, had been subject to no military service what-
ever, but it was a principle of the new order that free citizens must assume respon-
sibility for their own defense. The troops organized in 1796 were at first used to
keep the peasants and the counter- revolutionaries under control, but by the end of
1797 there were 15,000 organized Cisalpine troops, who soon thereafter were em-
ployed at both Rome and Naples. Conscription was introduced in 1798, in antici-
pation of the renewal of war; it caused trouble in the rural districts, though it
called for a levy of only 9,000 men in a population of three and a half millions.
Some Cisalpine soldiers were very enthusiastic; a group of cavalrymen, in 1798,
wished to volunteer for the projected Franco- Dutch invasion of England, to attack
the “enemy of the human race.”^30
The abolition of gilds, and of many old excises, tolls and internal tariffs, was
designed to open the way both for a new fiscal system, with planned budgets and
less cumbersome taxation, and for an enlarged and more active trading area in
place of the old local and municipal units.
27 Rota, Poggi in Nuov. riv. St., 128. Note the remark of the Encyclopedia italiana, XVIII, 185: “II
giornalismo politico italiano ha i suoi inizi nelle reppubliche italo- francesi.”
28 Morandi, 218–19.
29 In addition to works cited above see C. Cattaneo, L’antico esercito italiano (Milan, 1862).
30 Montalcini, II, 619–21.