The Republics at Rome and Naples 653
tenure of office in their own city. As in other revolutionary republics, primogeni-
ture and entail (fidecommessi) were abolished, and there were serious discussions of
the penal code and of public education. But the governing personnel had no inter-
est in a big, vague unified Italy in which they would be politically lost. The French
Directory were positively set against the idea of a unified Italy, which, if estab-
lished successfully, would become independent of, or even hostile to, France. The
Directory and its civilian commissioners therefore sided with the Roman moder-
ate Jacobins, and were attacked by the radicals for betraying the Revolution.
Advanced Jacobins denounced the rich absentee landowners, and called for a
system of more equal property in the hands of small owner- farmers. Vincenzo
Russo, in his Monitore, gained a reputation for Utopian radicalism by demanding
what is now called land reform. Some of the French could see the wisdom of such
a program, for the small owner- farmer was common enough in France; but fear of
the agrarian law or of Babouvism (which had proposed to abolish property, not
divide it) made it hard for the French to sympathize very warmly. The matter
reached the stage of serious discussion in the Tribunate but was blocked by the
moderate Jacobins of the Senate and the Consulate. The latter were in many cases
landowners themselves, and were buying up land confiscated from the Church. It
has been found that, of the 400 known purchasers of Church land in the Roman
Republic, about 70 were persons occupying a place in its government. Most others
were of the agricultural or mercantile possessing classes; and the total effect of the
land redistribution was to produce more, rather than less, concentration of land
ownership.^21 It is conceivable, and has been argued, that a serious land reform
might have attached the peasantry to the Revolution; but it seems very doubtful
that legislation of this kind, with the accompanying legalisms, delays, and confu-
sion, could have overcome the hatreds aroused in the countryside by requisition
and looting, and by attacks on religion.
At first, to repeat, persons feeling themselves to be good Catholics had accepted
the Republic. Nothing in the constitution or the official republican philosophy
questioned the spiritual authority of the Pope. Some Jacobins were religious, some
not. In May, some of the French troops were relieved by the Polish Legion sent
down from Milan. The Poles, fierce republicans in other respects, were also very
positive Catholics. They swarmed to the shrines of the city with cries of devotion
to the saints and the Holy Father. These exhibitions of piety aroused the disgust of
advanced Jacobins and Jacobin Evangelicals. Efforts were renewed to wipe out
superstition. In July there was a great demonstration that recalled scenes in France
in 1793. Before an altar of Liberty a miscellany of cardinals’ hats, titles of nobility,
minutes of the Inquisition, and the golden book of the Capitol were committed to
flames; and an architect named Barberi, in addition to breaking a cross and throw-
ing it in the fire, went on to debaptize himself by the simple expedient of washing
his hair.^22
In this overcharged atmosphere, as the advanced wing of the Italian Jacobins
loudly threatened the Kingdom of Naples, the governments of Naples and Austria
21 R. de Felice, La vendita dei beni nazionali nella Repubblica romana del 1798–99 (Rome, 1960).
22 Dufourcq, 241.