The Republics at Rome and Naples 645
exploited as conquered peoples; and while conceding a certain right of orderly
requisition to the French, or agreeing to make payments under treaty, to protest
against arbitrary extortion and looting, and to keep the proceeds of the sale of
confiscated properties for their own purposes.^3
Peace was made impossible by revolutionary movements beyond the French
borders which the Directory could neither prevent before they happened nor repu-
diate afterwards. Among the Swiss there were many—Ochs at Basel, La Harpe in
the Vaud, Usteri at Zurich—who wished to seize the opportunity to transform the
institutions of Switzerland. In addition, Bonaparte desired French control in the
upper Rhone valley (the Valais) to secure the communications between France and
the Cisalpine Republic. The conservative Swiss élites looked for support to Great
Britain and Austria. The Directory could not ignore the Swiss revolutionaries
without favoring its own enemies. It told the Swiss, in effect, at the turn of 1797–
1798 (as the Committee of Public Safety had told the Dutch in 1794) that it
would be best for them to stage their own revolution; but it also ordered General
Brune to stand by with French troops; and since the Swiss revolutionaries were
mild men who abhorred violence and discouraged mobs, their revolution was in
fact effectuated by French intervention, and the Helvetic Republic was proclaimed
in March. It is discussed in the next chapter.
Meanwhile trouble brewed at Rome. Some of the Italian democrats from all parts
of Italy, who for two years had congregated at Milan, moved on to Rome after the
Cisalpine was established. They formed an extreme fringe to a group of permanent
inhabitants of the city who desired changes in the Pope’s temporal and ecclesiastical
government. It is very doubtful what action the French would have taken except for
one incident. It seems clear that both the Directory and the Pope, until this inci-
dent, saw their advantage in remaining at peace with each other, the Directory be-
cause it wished to keep Austria quiet, the Pope because he knew that his territories
were threatened as much by the Austrians as by the French, and as much by the
King of Naples as by the revolutionary Italians. The papal government was unable,
however, to keep order in the turbulent city, and on December 28, 1797, the French
General Duphot was killed in a political demonstration near the French embassy.
The death of Duphot seemed the more intolerable to the French because it recalled
the death of Hugo de Bassville under similar conditions five years before. In the
ensuing uproar it was politically impossible for the Directory to excuse the papal
government. French troops from Milan occupied the city. In February the Roman
Republic was proclaimed. And soon the peripatetic Italian revolutionaries, now
gathered at Rome, were demanding the republicanization of Naples, which, how-
ever, was resisted by the Directory and did not occur until a year later, when a com-
bination of a French general with Italian Jacobins brought it about.
The appearance of two more revolutionary republics in peacetime, within three
months of the treaty of Campo Formio, made the preservation of peace far more
precarious. The new situation was entirely unacceptable to the Austrians. It was the
French hope that, by secularization and transfer of the ecclesiastical states of the
Holy Roman Empire, currently under discussion at the Congress of Rastadt, the
3 J. Godechot, Les commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1938).