French one, complete with five Directors and a bicameral legislature of
Ancients and Juniors. The murder of pro-French democrats in Genoa in
May 1797 gave Napoleon the excuse he needed to intervene there too: he
set up a Ligurian republic, with twelve Senators, a Doge and two elective
chambers.
Napoleon's desire to promote an incorporating union of Italian states
was, however, always predicated on his power struggle with the
Directors. About the thing in itself he was cynical. In October 1797 he
wrote to Talleyrand: 'You do not know the Italian people. They are not
worth the lives of forty thousand Frenchmen. Since I came to Italy I have
received no help from this nation's love of liberty and equality, or at least
such help has been negligible. Here are the facts: whatever is good to say
in proclamations and printed speeches is romantic fiction.'
In August, too, having carried his point with the Directors, he changed
his line in communication with them and argued that the islands of
Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia were much more important to the French
national interest than the whole of Italy put together. Presumably his
reasoning was that the islands were important centres on Mediterranean
and eastern trade routes and could generate continuing wealth, whereas
Italy had already been bled dry. His cynicism was borne out in 1798 when
the Republican experiment in Italy collapsed virtually overnight.
His changing attitude to Italy during 1797, moving from sanguine
euphoria to cynical defeatism, was almost certainly the result of the
tortuous six-month negotiation with Austria, when he and the Directory
seemed to be more concerned with winning the power struggle in France
than forcing the Austrians to sign a final treaty. Each of the five Directors
had good reason to be suspicious of their victorious general, but in
addition the Directory was divided against itself in a political imbroglio of
frightening complexity. Of the five directors Barras wanted peace at any
price while Reubell, the only true ex-Jacobin among them, wanted to
continue the revolutionary policy of exporting the ideas of '89. Neither
saw eye to eye with Bonaparte, for Barras thought Napoleon too hardline
in his dealings with the Austrians, while Reubell wanted to sacrifice the
gains in Italy to secure France her 'natural' frontiers on the Rhine.
Yet overlying these conflicts was an even more menacing development.
In May 1797 France lurched rightwards, as signalled by the elections to
the legislative councils. This was hard on the heels of the execution of
'Gracchus' Babeuf, who had plotted to destroy the Directory and replace
it with an extreme democratic-communistic system. Of the two standard
bearers of the 'new Right' Fran<;ois Barthelemy entered the Directory
while General Charles Pichegru, as president of the Five Hundred,
marcin
(Marcin)
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