The Republics at Rome and Naples 659
who edited the Monitore napoletano. Her view was that “the people distrust the
patriots because they do not understand them.”^30 She proposed, therefore, that civic
missionaries be sent into the countryside, and that writings be made available to
the people in dialect, to explain the true nature and aims of democracy; and this
was in fact done when, for example, a certain priest published, in dialect, The Re-
public Justified by the Holy Gospel. But, as Croce observed, the good Eleonora was in
fact mistaken; the people understood only too well, and refused to agree with the
patriots because they distrusted them. They distrusted them in part as coming
from a distant and pretentious class of society, like modern slum dwellers viewing
volunteer settlement workers with suspicion. They associated them with French-
men, civilian and military, who were draining the meagre resources of the country.
Ignorant and superstitious though they were, they understood that these well-
dressed patriots, with their cultured ways, were in many cases precisely those ab-
sentee owners of rural land, living in cities and holding country life in contempt,
who had for years been encroaching on village commons and building up vast es-
tates to be worked by an agricultural proletariat. Vincenzo Russo, who had called
for a division of great estates in the Roman Republic, could get even less attention
for this idea in Naples than in Rome. It is true that he befogged the issue with
other sentiments then favored by democrats in all countries, such as that public
officials should serve for little or no pay. The Neapolitan legislators enacted “the
abolition of feudalism,” and they did away with primogeniture and entail, though
the Republic did not last long enough for these measures to take effect. Basically,
they did nothing about the land question. Abject poverty remained the main social
problem; the mass of the people were hardly mistaken in seeing no advantage to
themselves in the fine ideals of political liberty, freedom of thought, and strict
equality before the law with which the republicans sought to attract them.
The fall of the Italian republics in 1799 was part of the general European counter-
revolutionary offensive described below in Chapter XXXII. It is appropriate to note
here some distinctive elements in the débacle at Naples—the constructive efforts of
the man by whom Naples was recovered for the monarchy, Cardinal Ruffo; his repu-
diation by the anti- republican extremists; and the consequent fate of the leading
Neapolitan “Jacobins,” who were not the only Jacobins in Europe to be summarily
disposed of in 1799, but who were subjected to an especially dramatic end.
Ruffo, who came from a noble Neapolitan family, had been a reforming minister
of Pius VI in the Papal States in the 1780’s, and though not a priest had been
made a cardinal in token of his services at the time of his dismissal from office. He
had tried in the Papal States, without success, to find means by which the peasants
might obtain secure tenures of small plots of land. He had more of a sense of the
actual social problems of the country, as well as more experience and capacity in
administration, than the republicans of either Rome or Naples. In January 1799 he
had advised Ferdinand IV not to desert the mainland, but had nevertheless fol-
lowed him to Sicily. In February he landed in Calabria with only eight compan-
ions, and was soon able to combine the armed insurrectionary bands, which he
found already in existence, into a half- organized host called the Christian and
30 Croce, 36.