650 Chapter XXVII
specifying that the “spiritual authority of the Pope should subsist intact,” abolished
his temporal power.^14 A few weeks later the constitution was proclaimed. It was
written, as already noted, by four Frenchmen; and it included, as article 369, a
provision that, until a future contingency which never came, no law of the new
republic could take effect until signed by the French military commandant. It is a
curious fact, worth mentioning in passing, that no foreign government ever recog-
nized the Roman Republic, except, in a sense, that of the United States, which was
represented at Rome by an Italian who acted as American consul. Having been
accredited to the “city of Rome” (not to the Pope) he decided to remain.^15
Who were the Roman “Jacobins”? Some were nobles—dukes and princes—in-
cluding Prince Borghese and two others of that family. Doctors were even more
prominent than among “Jacobins” elsewhere; one doctor, Angelucci, became a con-
sul or Director of the Republic. Lawyers were active as usual, including curiali who
practiced in the papal courts. Laymen with careers in the papal administration,
whose advancement was blocked by a system in which higher positions were al-
ways held by churchmen, were also numerous in the revolutionary ranks. So were
persons hoping to buy at low prices properties confiscated from church bodies—a
practice for which Pius VI had already set a kind of precedent. There were also
various artists, including the younger Piranesi and the sculptor Ceracchi, who had
twice been to America, where he had mixed with democrats in Philadelphia, been
elected to the American Philosophical Society, and done the busts, still famous, of
Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams. Among the Jews of Rome, who
threw off the ghetto badges on the day Berthier entered the city, there were a few
who were able and willing to go into public life; several joined the new National
Guard, and one was elected a senator. The Jews were, of course, at Rome, the only
religious minority. The most astonishing thing about the Roman Republic is the
number of Catholic churchmen who accepted it.^16
Fourteen cardinals (of twenty- six then in the city) took part in a Te Deum at St.
Peter’s in February to express thanks for “liberty regained.” It is true that, as the
revolution grew more radical, most of these dignitaries left the scene. Nevertheless
two cardinals, Antici and Altieri, reached the point of actually resigning from the
Sacred College, for reasons that remain unclear, but in which a reluctance either to
go into exile or to suffer from anticlerical persecution seems to have figured.
Granted that opportunists and cynics were not absent from the hierarchy of the
day, it is not necessary, and would probably be false, to attribute such acceptance of
the republic—with its corollary, the end of the Pope’s temporal sovereignty—to
14 Giuntella, Giacobina repubblica, 2; Dufourcq, 105.
15 Giuntella, Giacobina repubblica, 72, quoting Timothy Pickering’s despatch of June 11, 1799, to
Giovanni Batista Sartori, United States consul. Pickering refused formal recognition on the ground
that the Roman Republic was not really an independent state.
16 On Ceracchi see Renzo de Felice, “Ricerche storiche sul ‘giacobinismo’ italiano: Giuseppe
Ceracchi,” in Rass. st. del Risorgimento, XLVII (1960), 3–32; on the Jews, H. Vogelstein, Rome: Jewish
Communities Series (Philadelphia, 1940); on the Catholic clergy accepting the republic, Giuntella,
Giacobina repubblica, 17, and R. de Felice, “L’evangelismo giacobino e l’abate Claudio della Valle” in
Rivista storica italiana, III (1957), 196–249, 378–410. It is significant how fully de Felice agrees with
Giuntella, the two being the chief experts on the subject, in a long review of Giuntella’s ideas in Rass.
st. del Risorgimento, XLIV (1957), 830–32.