The Republics at Rome and Naples 649
otry. He was of “the school that believed revolution to be caused by ignorant and
desperate men. Actually, given the relative absence of a middle class enjoying some
independence from church and state (which at Rome were the same), the surpris-
ing thing is that there could be any revolutionary movement at all.
Pius VI had tried, in preceding years, to carry out reforms of the kind associated
with enlightened despotism in other countries, working especially through his
minister Ruffo, who, however, had made enemies among the great landowning
interests, so that the Pope had had to dismiss him. In 1797 Pius authorized the
sale of church- owned rural land to raise money for public purposes. Financial re-
form proved unsuccessful. Paper money, inflation, debt, and deficit took their toll.
Historians well- disposed to the papacy agree that conditions in both state and
church needed much reform. The Pope’s nephew, the Duke of Braschi, involved in
the grain trade by which the city was provisioned, and having in fact made a some-
what questionable fortune, was attacked in the streets by a mob; his carriage win-
dow was broken, his lackey was manhandled, and a plot to blow up his house was
announced by the police.^13 Violence at Rome was frequent enough, but it was ele-
mental and undirected.
For a revolution on the European model, there seemed to have been little intel-
lectual preparation. At Naples and at Milan, in the preceding half- century, there
had been active- minded Italian “philosophers,” but hardly at Rome. Jansenism, so
strong in Tuscany and in the universities of the Po Valley, had little following in
the pontifical city. The influx of French clerical émigrés in the 1790’s hardly fa-
vored an understanding of recent events in Europe. Nowhere was there a greater
dread of Freemasonry, which had been prohibited to Catholics as a secret society
since the days of Benedict XIV. The French Academy at Rome, which continued
to be a center for Frenchmen in the city during the years of the Revolution in
France, was thought of as a nest of Masonic conspirators. The famous Cagliostro,
impostor, alchemist, medical quack, and self- styled founder of a new branch of
Masonry (whose successes, it must be admitted, had been obtained north of the
Alps), was tried and convicted at Rome in 1789, and died in a Roman prison in
- To conservatives there seemed to be something “revolutionary” about Ca-
gliostro, and revolution was but another form of charlatanism. Since at Rome, as
elsewhere, one of the first steps of the innovators was to break down the ghetto,
and engage in fraternization with Jews, it was also believed, by some, that the
Revolution was Jewish.
Nevertheless, there was a revolution at Rome in 1798, and a significant number
of Romans took part in it. A detachment of the French armée d ’Italie, now com-
manded by Alexander Berthier as Bonaparte’s successor, arrived on February 10.
The Pope was ordered out of the city, and the papal government was dissolved. On
February 15, in the still unexcavated field of the ancient Forum, where a few time-
worn Roman columns thrust themselves up among wandering cattle, a gathering
of a few hundred patriots, assembled by Berthier, shouted its acclamations to an
Act of the Sovereign People. This act asserted the independence of the Roman
People, and their dedication to “truth, justice, liberty and equality”; and while
13 Pastor, XL, 259.