The Republics at Rome and Naples 657
The educated classes—those of the higher clergy, the professions of law and
medicine, and the circles of the newer Enlightenment which was well represented
in the cities—were drawn from the landowning families, among whom the divi-
sions between old nobility and newer gentility were somewhat blurred. With a
good deal of leisure and few nagging problems, many of these people favored the
most altruistic principles of the day. Nowhere was the sympathy for revolution
more distinterested or more idealistic. Given the social realities in the Kingdom of
Naples, there was little ground for a self- admiring conservatism, and under a dy-
nasty of such recent date and unedifying deportment the upper classes were not
fervidly royalist.
Revolutionary agitation began at least as early as 1792. At that time a French
naval squadron had visited the Bay of Naples, and there had been much excited
fraternization between French officers and sailors and inhabitants of the city. Two
clubs had been formed, and it was in this case a fact that Masonic lodges became
conspiratorial centers. The government, which as recently as 1789 had attempted,
in recognition of the lumi del secolo, to break up the privileged oligarchy at Brindisi
by making all its citizens “equally subject to the laws and taxes,”^27 now became fear-
ful of anything suggesting modern enlightenment. Government and clergy com-
bined to keep out a knowledge of French newspapers, French books, French ideas,
and French events. Repression became more severe after the dethronement and
execution of the French king and queen, and after Naples entered the First Coali-
tion. Large elements of the educated classes, disapproving in Naples as elsewhere
of the war against France, became increasingly contemptuous of a government that
lived in terror of any public discussion, and even of what its subjects might be pri-
vately reading or thinking in their houses. Official prohibitions were countered by
secret organizations, which in turn led to arrests and imprisonments. In the years
from 1794 to 1798 in Calabria alone, the “toe” of Italy, 493 persons were prose-
cuted for “crimes of opinion.” Hundreds of Neapolitan patriots went into exile,
first to France, then in 1796 to the Cisalpine Republic and in 1798 to Rome,
which they regarded as a final stage in their return.
When Championnet entered Naples he brought a band of these exiles with
him, and was joyously welcomed by patriots who had suffered at home in the pre-
ceding years. With the king’s ignominious abandonment of the mainland, and the
breakdown of the royal government, a great many others who were not really “Ja-
cobins” rallied to the Republic. Thus the eighty- eight- year- old Archbishop of Na-
ples, Cardinal Zurlo, despite all that had happened by this time at Rome, advised
acceptance of the new order; and when the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of
St. Januarius took place at the cathedral with only minor irregularity, it was given
out that God favored the new regime.
Neapolitan republicanism was indigenous and predominantly upper- class. It
was indigenous in the sense that hardly any “outsiders,” from other parts of Italy,
took part in the Neapolitan Republic, as they had done in the Cisalpine and the
Roman. Except for returned exiles like Vincenzo Russo, who had been active in
the disturbances elsewhere in Italy, and except for a few intellectuals of enlarged
27 Rodolico, 20, quoting an official document of 1789.