658 Chapter XXVII
outlook, the South Italian “Jacobins” had little idea of a unitary all- Italian state or
nation. The Cisalpine troops who came in with the French were regarded as for-
eign. North Italian interference or co- operation was not desired.
The high social standing of the republicans is beyond question. Two princes,
Caracciolo and Pignatelli, four marquises, a count and a bishop were among the
119 executed as Jacobins in the Bay of Naples before the year was out.^28 To observ-
ers like Lord Nelson and Cardinal Maury this infection of the aristocracy by repub-
lican principles was the most intolerable and disgusting aspect of the whole affair,
and was in fact taken by them as another sign of Italian degeneracy.^29 Very active in
the revolution also, after the French arrived and the royal authority crumbled in the
provinces, were the town- dwelling rural landowners of the cities of Calabria and
Apulia, a borghesia that performed few functions of a “bourgeoisie,” but which made
up most of the educated class outside the capital. To these were added the intel-
lectual and professional elites—doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, university graduates,
professors, students, writers, and a surprising number of the clergy. In Apulia, the
“heel” of the peninsula, the bishops at first accepted the republic; if they did so pri-
marily to keep the peace, and in deference to “established” authority, they were at
least not yet deterred by any systematic conservatism or ideology of the throne and
the altar. In southern as in northern Italy there were Jansenists who welcomed a
chance for church reform, or even for a kind of spiritual renewal on whose desir-
ability Christians and secular humanitarians could agree.
The weakness of the Republic, which was as apparent to the philosophical ideal-
ism of Croce as it has been to more sociologically minded historians, lay precisely
in this elite character of its leadership, and in the fact that the leadership never had
enough support either from the French or among the mass of its own people. The
French Directory did not favor the Republic; Championnet was soon recalled to
Paris; there were never more than a few thousand French soldiers in Naples, and
most of these, by May 1799, were recalled to the Po Valley to meet the threat of
Austrian invasion in the War of the Second Coalition. Left thus to themselves
after three months, the Neapolitan republicans, unable to recruit an army of their
own, had to face a population which at worst was in armed rebellion and at best
had no understanding of what they were trying to do.
The best of the republicans genuinely desired to improve the lot of the common
people, to give them schooling and education, to endow them with the benefits of
liberty and equality, to impart to them the dignity of citizenship in a decent coun-
try and some share in the advantages of European civilization. Typical of these
attitudes was Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, soon to be remembered as one of two
women executed at Naples for republicanism, a high- minded and generous soul
28 Names and occupations of the 119 are listed in Cuoco, 369–75.
29 On Nelson, see below; Maury wrote in October 1799 to Louis XVIII that “not eight noble fami-
lies preserved themselves from the revolutionary contagion” and that “revolutionary fanaticism [in
Naples] has been more ardent, atrocious and universal among the clergy and nobility than in France
itself, so that we are at least under the unexpected obligation to this horde of cannibals of now no
longer being the lowest among civilized nations.... Ninety- year- old priests, on being hanged, have
preached democracy and invoked the French at the steps of the gallows.” Correspondance et mémoires du
Cardinal Maury (Lille, 1891), I, 206 and 233.