776 Chapter XXXII
transmuted into something else, the authoritarian, innovating, dynamic, and yet
compromising semi- monarchism or semi- republicanism represented by Bonaparte.
As the year began it was clear that revolutionary, democratic, radical, or republi-
can movements (the appropriate word varying from place to place) had been extir-
pated in Poland and Eastern Europe, crushed in Ireland, and silenced in Great
Britain, while even in the United States the continued existence of Republicanism
as a political party was not yet certain. On the continent of Europe, on the face of
things, or as seen on a map, with the installation of a republic at Naples in January,
and the addition of the Grisons to the new Switzerland in March, the zone of the
new- style republics now reached its furthest extension. The République française,
including Belgium and the German left bank of the Rhine, adjoined the Batavian
Republic on the north and the Helvetic on the east. Its troops were in occupation
of Turin, from which the King of Sardinia had withdrawn to the island half of his
kingdom. The French also occupied Tuscany with the renewal of war. The rest of
the Italian mainland (except for Venetia) was laid out in republics to which the
names Cisalpine, Ligurian, Roman, and Neapolitan had been given. A short sail
from Brindisi lay the “Gallo- Greek departments,” or Ionian Islands, now annexed
to France and undergoing the usual changes. Farther overseas, in Egypt, though
cut off by Nelson’s victory, was the already fabulous hero of the Lodi bridge, who,
with his soldiers and his corps of civilian administrators and scientific experts, was
giving the Arab world its first injection of Western modernity.
On the surface, it all looked imposing, and it horrified the conservative in all
countries. In fact, the situation in the New Republican Order was very precarious.
The Still Receding Mirage of the Moderates
The struggle went on because compromise was impossible, and compromise was
impossible because so few people were ready to occupy a middle ground, and be-
cause so many, on both sides, feared that any advantage gained by their adversaries
would be ruinous to themselves. “Moderation,” as remarked in Chapter XXII,
could have two meanings, not necessarily related. It could mean a preference for a
middle way, and it could mean a desire to avoid violence, in the sense either of war
against other states, or forcible repression of dissent within, or abuse of constitu-
tional law by the resort to coups d’état. Given the facts of war and revolution, it
was a question whether even a middle way could preserve itself without violence.
The French Directory, early in 1799, was a moderate regime in many respects. It
had little interest in revolutionary expansion. It had done less than it might have
for the United Irish. It disapproved of the establishment of the Neapolitan Repub-
lic, and it recalled General Championnet, by whose action that republic had been
created. By coups d’état at the Hague and Milan, during the preceding year, it had
supported Batavian and Cisalpine moderates against democratic elements in those
countries, and it had discouraged those Italians who aspired to Italian unification.
Distrusting their own generals, fearing military dictatorship, and satisfied with the
republican cordon that extended from the Texel to the Tiber, the civilian Direc-
tors of France—who in early 1799 were Reubell, La Révellière, Barras, Merlin de