northern Italy Napoleon's innovations - which he claimed on St Helena
were the groundwork for his aim of Italian unification -built on what had
been done by the Austrians. There was little opposition to Bonaparte in
northern Italy, and the great landowners accepted posts in the new
administration, happy to fu rther the Emperor's plan to use Italy as
France's agricultural base, supplying sheep, rice, corn, cotton and sugar
and providing a market for French manufactured goods. The real
opposition to Napoleon was in Rome where he succeeded in alienating all
vital social sectors. Qu ite apart from the kidnapping of the Pope, he upset
the clergy by introducing divorce; he outraged the nobility by the
treatment of Pius and the plans to remove the Vatican itself to Paris; by
extensive conscription levies he failed to gain the love of the common
people; and he alienated the bourgeoisie, mainly lawyers, by abolishing
the Pontifical Tribunals; in any case this nascent middle class depended
too heavily on the Church and the old nobility to be able to break with
them.
Napoleon's popularity, evident in northern Italy if not Rome, seemed
to have been an Alpine affair, for in Switzerland too he won golden
opinions as the man who had swept away the unpopular Helvetian
republic and protected the Confederation Helvetique. His r8o3 act of
mediation was widely perceived to have maintained a rough-and-ready
form of social equality between Swiss citizens and to have preserved the
autonomy of the cantons; additionally a treaty of alliance gave the
Confederation a proper status within the Empire. But, here as elsewhere,
it was the Continental System that lost the Emperor many erstwhile
friends. The ranks of the anti-Bonapartists, originally confined to
aristocrats who had taken the Austrian side, were swollen after r 807 by
tradesmen and industrialists who suffered the consequences of the
Blockade. The Swiss were further alienated when the French annexed
the Valais in r8ro and when they occupied the Tessin. Then there was
the issue of the Alps themselves. Napoleon favoured the Mont-Cenis
route to Italy more than the Simplon as the axis of the route Paris-Turin
Genoa, so that by r8o7-o8 the traffic through the Mont-Cenis was four
times that through the Simplon. In r8ro the annexation of the Valais
made the Simplon even more important by simplifying the work of
customs officers. It was only after the annexation of Illyria, that the Swiss
retrieved their share of Alpine traffic. It became obvious that the traffic in
Levantine cotton would soon bring the Mont-Cenis route to a standstill
so, by a decree on rz April r8rr the Emperor divided the traffic between
the two routes and gave the same rights to the Simplon as to the Mont
Ccnis.
marcin
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