The Cisalpine Republic 607
were prohibited. Civil marriage was provided for, with divorce under certain con-
ditions. Outdoor manifestations of the Catholic cult were severely restricted, im-
ages of the Virgin and the saints were to be removed from the streets, streets
named for saints were to be re- named for republican worthies, priests were not to
offer public blessing to private houses, and no church bells were to toll at night. No
ecclesiastical documents originating outside the Cisalpine borders were to be ad-
mitted, bishops were to be designated by the government, and parish priests
elected by citizens. The Cisalpine (unlike the Batavian or the later Helvetic Re-
publics) even adopted the French republican calendar, without the overtones of
radical anti- Christianity in which that calendar had originated in 1793. Italian
names were invented for the months, and much of this ecclesiastical legislation
was known as the law of 13 Vendemmiale of the Year VI (13 Vendémiaire, or Oc-
tober 4, 1797).
Many Italians were of course horrified. As Carlo Morandi once remarked, the
fact that republicanism and Christianity were closer in Italy than anywhere else
meant that many simple people, especially in the country, thought that “liberty”
was some kind of a heresy, to be detested accordingly.^33 There were occasional out-
bursts of violence, more often in words than in fact, for there was much less real
ferocity in the Cisalpine than in France, or in the Roman Republic of 1798. Some-
times, however, speakers at the Milan Club worked themselves into a high pitch of
excitement, as when a woman there, in an impassioned speech, offered her hand to
any man who would bring her the Pope’s head in a basket.^34 Moderate and conser-
vative persons seized upon and exaggerated such episodes to denounce the irreli-
gion of a rampant democracy.
It was in this overcharged atmosphere, or in this Jansenistic-Jacobinical uproar,
that the man who was to be the next Pope (becoming Pius VII in 1800) made his
first direct and personal acquaintance with the European revolution.^35 When the
French entered Bologna, in June 1796, Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti was the
bishop of Imola only twenty miles away. His reception of the French officers was
so courteous, and his efforts to keep the peace so consonant with their demands,
that he was already mentioned by some as a “Jacobin.” A year later, with the rest of
the Cispadane, the bishop of Imola found his diocese incorporated into the Cisal-
pine Republic. He accepted its constitution, with its abolition of nobility, though
like all the cardinals except Maury he was of noble birth himself. He never con-
ceded the right of the government to appoint churchmen or to exclude papal com-
munications from the country. But he agreed to waive the title of Monsignor and
be addressed as “Citizen Cardinal.” He put Liberty and Equality on his letter-
33 Morandi, 241.
34 B. Peroni, “La società popolare di Milano, 1796–99,” in Rivista storica italiana LXVI (1954),
511–17.
35 J. Leflon, Pie VII: des abbayes bénédictines à la papauté (Paris, 1958), is not only an account of
Pius VII’s career before 1800, but gives a detailed view of the Cisalpine Republic, pp. 360–531. For a
briefer account see Leflon, “Le cardinal Chiaramonti, évêque d’Imola, et la Republique cisalpine,” in
Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, XLIII (1956), 427–33. See also V. Giuntella, “Cristianesimo e
democrazia in Italia al tramonto del Settecento: appunti per una ricerca” in Rass. st. del Rts., XLII
(1955), 289–96.