Climax and Dénouement 783
It was in Italy that the conservative counter- offensive enjoyed its greatest suc-
cesses. Suvorov began to defeat the French, with their Cisalpine and Polish auxil-
iaries, in the Po valley in April. Except at Genoa, all the Italian republics fell.
When Pius VI died in France, to which he had been removed at the outbreak of
the war, the victories of the Coalition made it possible for the cardinals to meet for
the election of a new pope. This fact alone was significant, since the most deter-
mined free- thinking and Voltairean republicans had hoped that with the Roman
Republic the papacy itself might become extinct. The collapse of the republic at
Rome left the city in a state of confusion, so that the cardinals met for their con-
clave at Venice under the protection of Austria.
They assembled in the belief that the Revolution was at last about to expire.
Cardinal Rohan, of Diamond Necklace fame, the ci- devant Bishop of Strasbourg,
once the richest prelate in France, with over 400,000 livres a year of church reve-
nues, was so confident of his imminent restoration that he refused to attend the
conclave at all. He hovered about south Germany, ready to proclaim himself in his
diocese upon arrival of the Austro- Russian armies. The conclave proved to be a
long one, since the Austrian party among the cardinals could not elect their candi-
date, it being known that Austria wished to annex portions of the Papal States.
After several months, in March 1800, when it seemed that the new regime in
France would be more tolerant of Catholicism, and in opposition to the ambitions
of Austria, the Spanish government used its influence to support those cardinals
who were least uncompromising toward the Revolution. The result was the elec-
tion of Cardinal Chiaramonti, the Bishop of Imola, who had in his way welcomed
democracy and accepted the Cisalpine Republic in 1797, and who, as Pius VII,
soon negotiated a concordat with the French Republic.
Meanwhile, in 1799, the anti- republican forces were triumphant. At Naples 119
republicans, including fifteen clerics, were put to death; and the restored monarchs
gave classic expression to the most extreme sentiments of counter- revolution,
when Queen Maria Carolina told Nelson to treat Naples “like a rebel Irish town,”
and King Ferdinand ordered no mercy for “these rebels against God and Me.”
Reactionary insurrectionism using religious slogans spread from south to north.
What was called San Fedism in Naples was called the Viva Maria in Tuscany, and
a good deal of violence broke out against persons not sufficiently Christian. En-
raged country people invaded the town of Siena, sacked its ghetto, killed over a
dozen Jews, and burned three of them alive along with the tree of liberty in the
piazza. Jews were also brutally manhandled at Ancona, in the Roman Republic,
after its surrender by the French. Further north, with the collapse of the Cisalpine
Republic, the triennio was followed by the tredici mesi, or thirteen months, known
also as the Austro- Russian Reaction.^14
14 For the phrases quoted from the King and Queen of Naples see p. 660 above. For confirmation
of the incidents at Siena my former student, Mr. R. B. Litchfield, has made a study in the libraries of
Florence; he concludes that at least three Jews were actually burned, but that the archbishop’s remark,
furor populi,fjuror Dei, was the embellishment of an anti- clerical writer about 1880. For Ancona see M.
Mangourit, Défense d ’Ancone et des départements romains... aux années VII et VIII, 2 vols. (Paris, 1802),
I , 2 07.