610 Chapter XXV
the battle of Lodi, was dubious of the whole republican undertaking. Held back
from reaction by his distrust of Austria, which he rightly suspected of wishing to
kill the Cisalpine state, he toyed with the thought of a Cisalpine monarchy under
a Spanish Bourbon prince. Most moderates did not differ from democrats except
in degree. Their “moderation” showed itself in a tendency to federalism, or prefer-
ence for municipal autonomy as in former times, by their warnings against irreli-
gious excesses, a disinclination to promote revolution throughout Italy as a whole,
and a sense of caution against becoming too outspokenly anti- French.
It was the democrats, or giacobini, who had the most influence during these
years. Some were active in the government, some at the Milan club; and they ed-
ited most of the political journals. Advanced democrats talked of vast popular and
national upheavals, but had little contact with the actual masses. Those who came
from Venice, Sardinia, Rome, or Naples were made radical by the repression from
which they had suffered, and by the unteachable immobility of the governments
that they opposed. A united Italy was easy for them to conceive, since there was
nothing in the country’s institutions worth preserving by mere federation. They
thought that the French should liberate the human race, or at least the Italian part
of it, and were critical of the French Directory for being swayed by military, strate-
gic, or diplomatic considerations. They found friends, therefore, among Frenchmen
in Italy who for various reasons were also critical of the Directory—army contrac-
tors who resisted sporadic attempts to keep their depredations within bounds; po-
litical generals of advanced democratic views, or those who merely strained at the
leash of civilian control; or itinerant civilians of one kind and another, whose opin-
ions had been formed during the most radical phases of the Revolution in France.
Thus Sylvain Maréchal, who had been a Babouvist, published a diatribe on the
French betrayal of Venice. Or there was young Marc- Antoine Jullien, who had
worked for Robespierre in 1794, and was working in 1797 for Bonaparte, for whom
he published a soldiers’ newspaper of enthusiastic republican tone: Le courrier de
l ’Armée d ’Italie. At Milan he became involved in propaganda for Theophilanthropy
against Christianity, and in plots with secret Italian committees for revolutioniz-
ing beyond the borders of the Cisalpine, “to devour the duchies and monarchies
that surround it.”^40
For the French Directory, after the peace of Campo Formio, the more excitable
of the Italian democrats, with their French friends, became something of a nui-
sance, causing broils with the Church, preventing the consolidation of the Cisal-
pine Republic, playing politics with French generals, and making difficult any ar-
rangement with Austria.
The official French attitude toward the “sister” republics was determined in part
by ideological factors, which for a few months after the Fructidor coup d’état fa-
vored the democrats, and still more by arguments of a military or practical charac-
ter. We have seen that in Holland a Dutch Fructidor was followed by a Dutch
Floréal, that in January 1798, when it seemed that the democrats in the Batavian
Republic were more willing than the federalists to co- operate in an attack on En-
40 G. Vaccarino, I patrioti “anarchistes” e l ’ idea dell ’unità italiana, 1796–99 (Turin, 1955), 59; A.
Aulard, “Bonaparte republicain” in Etudes et leçons, IX (Paris, 1924), 82–88.