The Republics at Rome and Naples 661
observed: “Your news of the hanging of thirteen Jacobins gave us great pleasure;
and the three priests, I hope [will] dangle on the tree best adapted to the weight of
their sins.”^35 Nelson, in short, carried out King Ferdinand’s wishes with complete
personal satisfaction. The prince and former admiral, Caracciolo, was hanged by
his order from the yardarm of the warship Minerva. He was one of 119 republi-
cans put to death at Naples in the following months.
The Neapolitan Republic expired in an anarchy which in some parts of the
country sank into habitual brigandage. The Bourbon monarchy was restored at a
ruinous cost: the intellectual élite had been wiped out or silenced, a monarchy
once enlightened became notorious for its imbecility, and the king boasted that
he would henceforth rely on his faithful lazzaroni, the most ignorant and des-
titute among his people. Loudly complaining that republicans were tools of the
French, the monarchy at Naples depended, until its final collapse in 1860, on
British, Austrian, or any other foreign support that it could obtain against its
own subjects.
One of the survivors of the Neapolitan revolution was Vincenzo Cuoco. He had
played a minor role, but was condemned to twenty years’ exile and went to France,
from which he returned to Italy in 1801 to enjoy a career of some prominence in
the Napoleonic states. In 1801 he published his Saggio storico sulla Rivoluzione
napoletana. It was less a history than a series of reflections on history. Its message
was that the revolution at Naples had failed because it was “passive” and “abstract.”
He extended the same criticism to the whole Italian movement of the 1790’s, and,
pursuing his reflections, attributed the quality of excessive “abstraction” to the
French Revolution itself. His work thus came to represent in Italy, in a mild way,
the kind of thinking that Burke expressed in England and which the emergence of
the historical school of jurisprudence was soon to express in Germany. Indeed, the
Saggio was translated into German in 1805. “Abstraction” in this case meant the
argument, already long familiar in 1801, that the ideas of the patriots were too
general, involving conceptions of a universal liberty or equality, or humanity, or
constitutionalism, or asserted rights, that had no relation to practical issues or cir-
cumstances, or to the differences among nationalities and national cultures. By the
“passivity” of the Italian revolution Cuoco meant that it had been brought in by
the French, or at least that the Italian republicans had been hardly more than en-
thusiasts responding to a French stimulus and entirely dependent on French deci-
sions. Under nineteenth- century conditions Cuoco’s view became part of the con-
ventional wisdom.
Italian historians of all schools, for the last half- century, while differing with
each other, have found it necessary to refute Cuoco. They have argued that the
35 Ibid., 376. The role of Nelson at Naples in 1799 has been much debated. Croce in 1896 (Riv-
oluzione napoletana, X XI) called for an intensive study, which was supplied by F. Lemmi, Nelson e
Caracciolo e la Repubblica napoletana, 1799 (Florence, 1898). Lemmi concluded, 89, that “while many
causes may have worked together to push Nelson into the iniquities by which he stained himself at
Naples in 1799, the principal cause must be sought in his education, in his proud and imperious tem-
perament and in his political passions and convictions.” Gutteridge, op.cit., 1903, reached a more fa-
vorable judgment, but though publishing and reprinting many documents, he refrained from includ-
ing many in which Nelson’s “political passions” were apparent, and which had already been published
in the Dispatches of 1845, from which a few examples are quoted above.