There is a page in the history of contemporary Italy, that we could say was "intentionally left blank". The long series of popular movements against the ideas and implementations of the French Revolution that took place everywhere in Italy between 1796 and 1814 when Italy was exposed to the military and political domination of the French revolutionary state have been studied and interpreted only in minimal part. Thus, the overall process of making of Italy as an independent and unified state, as well as its modernisation were told and explained normally leaving this important page apart. As a consequence of this and just for this reason not taking into consideration possible intentional falsifications of facts , the history of Italy in this period in special mode its "official" version, i. e. the one taught in private and public schools gives an incomplete picture of the historical reality, an interpretation that sounds rather artificial, and results more in a history of the winners than in a common, shared by the majority of population, history.
In fact, the political making of Italy, the shift from "Ancien Régime" to political modernity, was not the result of a progressive evolution that substantially safeguarded the legacy of the past, as in the case of the Anglo-Saxons countries. Even if we speak about an "American Revolution" we must admit that also the new American Republic shared more elements of continuity with British thought and institutions of the XVIII century than the French state with the monarchy. Italys modernization of was actually the fruit of a brutal rip between past and present, the expression of the strong will of a minority formed by highly ideologized intellectuals and politicians, a drive that symmetrically experienced a strong opposition and resistance from the populations of Italy.
Similarly to what happened to European and, later, Latin American catholic countries, from 1796 to 1870 Italy was unified into a modern liberal state, but at the price of a conflict between the innovative and the conservative forces, both cultural and political. Final outcome was a new political entity, segregated from Roman Catholic Church, highly centralized and bureaucratic. Italian government was firmly in the hands of a scanty minority of liberals, that is progressives high-class men, elected through a system in which only a narrow percentage about 2% of male people of the population was granted the right of vote for the Parliament in Rome and for local administrative assemblies.
As a consequence of this enduring conflict and of the relative instability of the new regime, political and social groups which had prevailed felt as a priority to carry out cultural politics, with aimed to push as soon as possible Italians until then living in different principalities to share a common national culture, in line with the principles of the Italian Revolution. In other words, for the new state it was compelling to start and achieve a process of "nationalization of the masses", similar to that studied by American historian George Lachmann Mosse (1918-1999).
Thus, in writing of the historical "Vulgata" upon the making of modern Italy, it is not surprising to see that "uncommon" and contested figures, episodes and ideas have been removed from the public discourse or at least undersized. It can be usual to see this happen when the question is to elaborate what is called the "myth of foundation" of a newly formed state. But what is not usual and definitely amazing is that this approach had been applied to all ways of writing and telling history about modern Italy and the "Vulgata" has become the only possible version of facts and the Leitmotiv of every scholarly essay. During XIX and XX centuries, Italian and also non-Italian contemporary historians, like, e. g., Denis Mack Smith and Stuart Joseph Woolf , never made any effort either to question and criticize or to possibly revise the "official" way of recounting the making of Italy. Causes of this are still under investigation. As a "work hypothesis", I would like to mention the strict control that the new power the monarchy, as well as the republic, in substantial continuity deployed upon historiography and, in general, upon cultural milieu. Main leverage for this was the control of financial sources: in Italy there are indeed no private foundations or other institutions capable of sustaining scholarly research. Research is actually 100% funded by the government. A second determinant role has been played by Marxist thought, in its Italian "soft" version worked out by the Sardinian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). For this philosophy, historical factors are more important than economical factors and cultural elements are determinant to "make" the Revolution in evolved and highly complex western societies, like Italy in XIX century was. This kind of thought exerted a strong influence upon Italian Communist Party (PCI). PCI official political line saw the conquest of hegemony upon the Italian culture, as a condition for the conquest of political power. This line was successful, and even though the access of communists or of PCI heirs, the "Democrats of Left" party to the area of power is relatively recent, they won the battle for "cultural power" at least since the Sixties of 1900. Lines and choices of historical institutions were therefore largely influenced by the sound presence of gramsciani intellectuals in the nervous "ganglions" of Italian cultural system. This was reflected in publishing of books, in popular or scholarly magazines, in teaching in public and in private schools, and, last but not least, in making of encyclopaedias and dictionaries. For instance, it is astonishing indeed to see how many items related to revolutionary thought, history, personages, etc. have been implemented, in comparison with other subjects. No space was left to other ideologies, apart to some liberal and catholic intellectuals, in any case allegedly "organic" to Marxist thought and to the line of the party.
History of late modern Italy used to see the years from about 1790 to 1870 as a continuous process of emancipation and political change called "Risorgimento", or literally "rebirth" , that Italians of all social conditions had expected and invoked since a long time. This process would have had three major goals. First of all, the pursuit of independence from foreign influence; second, the unification of the country from Alps to Sicily, and finally the making of a modern political and social organization monarchy or republic , segregated also from the Roman Church. The thrust to independence, unity and modernization would have been shared by the majority of people, but de facto achieved by the joined efforts and sacrifices of an "enlightened" minority, whose symbol-men are the Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) the diplomat o the "Weaver" , Giuseppe Mazzini the soul or the "Apostle" and Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi (1807-1882) the warrior or the "Sword". No opposition, no resistance, only an overall enthusiastic consensus of the Italians would have accompanied and supported this generous effort. In the religious domain only some resistance would have been encountered, mainly due the cutting down of the temporal power of the Pope, considered as a mandatory premise of the unification.
As obvious, this sort of "golden legend" doesnt tell all the truth or doesnt tell it at all.
In reality, the making of modern Italy was for sure the enterprise of a minority, but of a minority whose culture was not shared by the majority. In fact religious and civil ruling classes were strongly influenced by modern culture, born in Italy at the end of the Middle Age and spread to all civilized countries. During XVIII century the overall mentality of ruling groups changed again dramatically under the pressure of the French Enlightenment, with its rationalist and "theistic" some times atheistic view of life. Enlightenments culture was elaborated and widely spread by Masonic lodges and, in as second step, also by what the French historian Augustin Cochin (1876-1916) called the "societies of thinking", that is the "clubs". This sort of "cultural revolution" fatally drove to a social change. At its earliest stage, during the second half of the century, the new culture poured into the legislation of most of the monarchies in continental Europe, marking the age of the so-called "enlightened despotism". This was the case of France, Prussia and what survived of the Holy Roman Empire, i. e. the Austrian multinational monarchy. Also in small principalities, republics and monarchies of pre-modern Italy significant political, social and religious reforms occurred under the initiative of Italian sovereigns: in the State of Milan, in Kingdom of Naples, even in Popes States Bologna, Romagna, Umbria, Lazio, Marche. However, lower and rural classes were less influenced by this change and maintained an attitude intensely religious, usually refractory to philosophy and traditionally firmly attached to the old regime. It must be underlined that the "Ancien Régime" as the pre-Revolutionary social order was later called by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was the ultimate legacy of the social and political order, originated from the medieval age, i. e. the Christianity. Although largely modified by modernity since XV century, the Ancien Régime held the major characters that made the medieval political order. Hierarchy, priority given to tradition, a unique shared social moral, stiff social ranks societas cetualis , unity between State and Church, vast social presence of ecclesiastic institutions, a wide range of ad hoc legislation also known as "privilege", i. e. lex privata , professional guilds, and, finally, a "feudal" model of social relationships, based on a man-to-man relation. Capital marks of this order were basically two: the priority given to the rights of social corps the so-called universitates , instead to those of individuals; second, the religion as foundation of the social order. If the first resulted in a relatively broad autonomy of society towards politics, the second worked as the key, as the lens, through which the reality and the secular order were understood and interpreted.
This conflict became particularly evident when Italy made the first experience of 1789 Revolution and of political modernization, at the time when the French republican Army invaded Italy.
This happened at the end of a long war, usually completely ignored, which was called the "War of Alps". Between 1792 and 1796 the army of the King of Sardinia Vittorio Amedeo III (1726-1796), allied to Great Britain and to Austrian Empire, tried to militarily resist to the pressure of the new revolutionary Republic, who applied the so-called "doctrine of natural borders", and pushed in direction of Rhine River and of the western Italian Alps. In 1796, however, a few days after a young general, the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), had taken the head of the Armée dItalie, Piedmont was eventually defeated and had to give up to its transalpine domains, the birth-place of the Savoy dynasty, as well as to the Nice county, contiguous with France, at the very end of the Ligurian coast. Monarchy was also due to pay one of the heaviest contribution of war ever seen and to have many of its most important strong places occupied by French troops.
Once eliminated its most powerful adversary, it was really a trifle for the French Army to get in power of the whole northern Italy. Milan was occupied mid-may 1796 and in a few years the political face of the Peninsula had completely changed.
A "Cisalpina" i. e. "before the Alps" democratic Republic was created, by putting together Lombardia, Bologna, Romagna and later the former Helvetian Valtellina.
The very old Republic of Venice de facto a continental power swiftly disappeared; his territory was divided basically into two segments: Bergamo and Brescia were aggregated to the new Cisalpina Republic; the remainder became part of the imperial domains; the new border line of Austria in northern Italy thus became the Adige river. In 1796 French towards the States of Pope also made an attempt. In February a brief combat with the small pontifical army took place at the border between the so-called Legazioni Pontificie, in Romagna, and the region of the Marche, on the small river Senio. But it was just a symbolic reaction to the occupation of Pope Pius VI (1717-1799), who immediately signed a treaty of peace with the French Republic in Tolentino. With these agreements Pope lost Bologna and the Legazioni of Romagna.
During 1798 Piedmont was fully incorporated in the French state and the new King Carlo Emanuele IV (1751-1819) had to seek refuge in Sardinia. Popes domains were definitely invaded and Pope himself was taken prisoner and deported to Florence earlier and then to France. A "Roman" Republic was created in Rome, which extended to the territories of Umbria, Lazio and Marche. The old Republic of Genoa was "democratized" and a "Ligurian" Republic created in place of it.
In 1799 while Pius VI died in captivity in France Italy fell completely under the control of French armies. Tuscany was occupied beginning of the year, as well as the Kingdom of Naples, where King Ferdinando IV of Borbone (1751-1825) fled to Palermo in Sicily under the protection of the British Navy.
But that year as Im telling in paragraph 5 wind changed for France and between 1799 and 1800 Italy was completely liberated by the European powers Austrian Empire, Russian Empire, Prussia, Great Britain and Turkey allied together. After the parenthesis of this so-called "first Restoration", half 1800 Italy fell again under the French and Napoleonic domination that lasted until 1815. During this period new political and administrative entities republics, kingdoms were created, undone, re-created in another form, according to Emperors desires and French strategic requirements.
However, not only the surface of Italy changed. French domination was indeed not comparable with those occurred in the past. The French army was a revolutionary army: it exploited local populations to survive and to fight. Moreover, French Directoire wanted Bonaparte to exploit the allegedly huge resources material, financial and artistic of the peninsular states, in order to sustain the exhausted cash of Revolution. Third, French generals and political commissioners for ideological reasons wanted to bouleverser the political status of Italy. Local groups of "patriots", i. e. revolutionary intellectual minorities till then meeting in the "clubs" and conventionally called "Jacobins" forced to this, in order to benefit of so long awaited freedom and equality.
As a consequence of the political subversion exerted by French authorities, old governments were cancelled in a few days, ancient constitutions abrogated, most of the old local autonomies cancelled, worker guilds put outlaw, old aristocracy banished, religious orders suppressed leaving monasteries abandoned or replaced by barracks or salt and ammunition depots.
This dramatic, too quick and not rarely brutal change strongly impacted the usual way of life of Italians, unchanged since centuries. Not all people accepted it as positive and beneficial. Actually, an abstract "Freedom" replaced concrete and traditional "freedoms"; people experienced for the first time the "impiety" of the ruler; moreover, revolutionary "clubs" showed arrogance and sometimes disclosed open atheism, and their pressure towards foreign generals to subvert the traditional order was interpreted as a pure and simple treason.
All those factors had necessarily to create a spirit of reaction and the desire of resisting to a change of horizon, sometimes perceived as unnecessary and threatening.
Since the beginning, from 1796, here and there, wherever French soldiers arrived, riots and revolts, insurrections and guerrilla the term itself was created during the national insurrection of Spanish population against Napoleon in 1808-1814 started to burst in Italy.
A. During the War of Alps
Early popular movements occurred in Piedmont during the War of Alps, in the years 1792 to 1796. They went on also after the armistice. A spontaneous mobilization of rural populations and of mountaineers took place in Maritime Alps and Apennines, beside that of territorial militias that fought in the frame of the royal army.
B. Northern Italy (1796-1797)
But the first great insurrection against the French Revolution was that of Pavia and Lodi, in the Plain of the Po, in proximity of Milan. Only a few days after the entrance of Bonaparte in Milan, on 23 May 1796 five thousand of peasants revolted and attacked the French troops, defeated the French garrison and occupied Pavia. Local Jacobins were sought and arrested, but did not suffer any violence. Bonaparte, already close to Mantua a strategic strong place near Verona that he was about to put under siege , got immediately back, pointing directly to the rebel city. In Binasco, a small village mid road between Milan and Pavia, he encountered a resistance by some peasants in arms. Then, French cavalry charged and easily scattered the peasants, opening the road to Pavia. Bonaparte decided to fire the village, to give an example in order to discourage similar rebellions elsewhere. Some one hundred inhabitants of Binasco died in the fire and in the pillage of the town. A few hours later, Pavia was assaulted by French pioneers, that opened the way to the cavalry, that broke into the city and pitiless shot and sabred peasants and citizens, while these tried desperately to resist in a door-to-door very cruel combat. After the victory Bonaparte allowed its troops the right of sack for twenty-four hours. The result of combats and sack were about seventy victims, many people wounded, women raped and serious damages, due to violence and thefts.
However this was just the very beginning of the Italian insurgence against Revolution. The same year, Garfagnana a small valley roughly parallel to the Tyrrhenian seaboard in northern Tuscany and then belonging to the Duke of Modena Francesco IV of Austria-Este (1779-1846) rose up. The same occurred in Lugo, near Faenza, in Romagna, where revolted peasants killed about one hundred French soldiers. In August Casalmaggiore, near Cremona, on the Po River border, rose up as well. In both places French retaliation were particularly cruel. It was astonishing to see normally pacific people that didnt experience war since decades and for the first time heard the roar of the cannon breaking the silence of the plain, as a chronicler reported to grasp old harquebuses, sticks and scythes and to hurl on the most powerful army in Europe.
The popular reaction increased and escalated in 1797, when French invaded the Venetian territory. The fearful authorities in Venice since mid-1796 had allowed the powerful invaders to do what they wanted beyond the Adige River, in Bergamo and in Brescia. In March of 1797 Jacobins expelled the weak Venetian representatives "rettori" and "podestà" and proclaimed a democratic republic in these two latter cities. In a few weeks Venice completely lost the control of these provinces. But both the French and the Venetian authorities underestimated the attitude of people, especially those living in the valleys surrounding the two old cities. In march 1797 all the mountaineers of Bergamo and Brescia area were in state of insurrection, mainly due to the fear of loosing their traditional freedoms and privileges, once failed the venetian authority. Afterwards, also the communities of the Lake of Garda revolted. But the greatest rebellion took place in Verona, in April, around the Easter, in the so-called "Veronese Easters", that recalled the medieval revolt of "Vespri Siciliani". When French decided the full military occupation of the city, raged groups of men of the people attacked isolated French troops, killed them with daggers and threw them some of which still alive into the Adige river. A few detachments of Venetian territorial troops joined the insurgents on its own decision: no order in this sense was ever issued by Venice. The struggle took place along the streets of the old town and in the outskirts. It was very harsh and many people fell dead from both sides. A couple of local Venetian patrician took the head of the insurgents: but they only wanted the city to remain part of the Republic, nothing more. Bonaparte, however, was not willing to this and he sent a powerful force to subdue the rebel city. No retaliation was decided after the repression but Veronese families were imposed the heaviest tax one could imagine. Only a few days after, however, preliminary agreements between France and the Austrian Empire were signed in Campoformio, near Udine, and Verona, Vicenza, Padova, Belluno, the Friuli and Venice itself where the old aristocratic political structure was replaced by a democratic Republic, ruled by the Jacobins became new provinces of the Austrian Empire. The five months of hard French military occupation left no regret in the Venetian populations. On the contrary, and despite the ultimate loss of its political autonomy, they welcomed the Austrian armies with a relative great enthusiasm.
In 1797 other areas revolted. This was the case of what remained of Popes domains after Tolentino Treaty. Every hill and mountain between Romagne and Marche, in direction South, in the area called Montefeltro, rose up against French. A number of episodes of popular resistance, reaction and subsequent French retaliations occurred, but its story is too long to be told. Also the Valtellina in the far North of the Cisalpina Republic revolted.
C. Central Italy, 1798
However, popular insurrections of northern Italy turn pale in respect of what happened in the Centre and South of the Peninsula.
In 1798, starting from the famous probably for other reasons district of Trastevere in Rome a tough rising arose and spread to the hills surrounding the Capital City of the newly created Romana Republic. It then turned to southern Lazio, to Frosinone and to the republican Department of Circeo, where most of the rural population were located. A hard conflict exploded between the republican troops in charge of the repression French, Polish and also Italian and the insurgents, with plenty of engagements and ambushes. Also the Marche remained in a permanent state of insurgence.
The same happened in the Abruzzi Teramo, LAquila and Chieti at the beginning of 1799, when French troops began to invade the Kingdom of Naples. Probably, the most famous resistance to this invasion is that of lowest classes in Naples. While the King Borbone left for Sicily and authorities left behind him in Naples openly betrayed him, only the so-called "lazzaroni", the poorest part of the common people, using to live with temporary and sometimes nasty jobs, opposed themselves to the invaders. Not the republican "patriots", who barricaded inside the fortresses that surrounded and dominated Naples and had rather shell the "lazzari" while they went to the attack of French. After two days of heroism that was appreciated also by French commanders "lazzari" had nevertheless to give up and submitted. The revenge of Republicans was angry against the old class and the "friends of Borbone" and the sentences to death were really a number, probably more than one thousand.
D. The "magic year" for insurgents: 1799
In 1799, indeed, French believed that the whole Peninsula was in their hands. So as I pointed above they do not hesitated to incorporate Piedmont, to invade the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Lucca and finally to try to seize a substantial portion of the Kingdom of Naples.
However, in 1799, this plan was deployed in an unfavourable overall scenario. Several concurrent factors made this scenario, which had to result in a strong revival of popular insurgence.
First, Bonaparte was not any longer at the head of the army of Italy. Due to some disagreements with the Directoire of Paris he had been sent to Egypt, attempting to reduce the British influence in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Middle East. On the other side, at the head of the allied armies had been appointed a true genius of the military art, the never-defeated Russian general Count Aleksandr Vasilievitch Suvorov (1729-1800). Furthermore, the new and powerful coalition of powers against France seemed to understand the potential benefit of a general popular and "national" insurrection in order to at least create troubles to French armies. For this reason, allied headquarters everywhere encouraged the popular rebellion and tried to have it integrated with its military effort. Third, when war resumed in early 1799, after the first battles in northern Italy, French armies were seriously defeated, so that their position became highly critical in the whole Peninsula.
Thus, once heard of the defeat of Cassano dAdda, near Milan, the two French armies of Naples and Rome, under the command of general Etienne Jacques Joseph Alexandre Macdonald (1765-1840), decided to hastily retreat and moved to north. In coincidence with this, the insurgence developed its major effort and grew furiously almost everywhere.
D.1 The Kingdom of Naples
In the Kingdom of Naples a man with only seven fellows got off from Sicily to Calabria in early 1799. He was from Calabria and was a member of the oldest nobility of the Kingdom. He had also been appointed Vicar and plenipotentiary of the King Ferdinand of Borbone. His name was Fabrizio Ruffo di Baranello (1744-1827). He was a past minister of Pope Pius VI government and a Cardinal although not priest of Holy Roman Church. In a few weeks he managed to stir up all communities of Calabria many of which had feudal relations with his family and to create an embryo of a new popular army that called itself "Armata della Santa Fede", i. e. Army of the Holy Faith. In brief, this army managed to raise also Lucania and Puglia, with its number of town and municipalities. With the progress of its march to North, the ranks of the army gradually increased to tens of thousands of people and also the organization was improved, reaching the level of a half-regular army. When the army arrived in Naples in June 1799, armament was in line with international requirements, ranks, mobilization and supplies were those of a normal army. The drama of the "Jacobin" Republic of Naples, that lived between February and June 1799, was in that: if it had been created by mean of French arms, it had to fight alone against the "Santa Fede" army, an army well organized, full of rage and burning of desire of revenge. Harsh combats and cruel massacres took place in Calabria, in Puglia and in Campania. On the "Sanfedisti" side, the cost of combats in Isernia, in Isola del Liri, and especially in Andria (Bari) was hundreds of victims; on that of Republicans and French, combats in Crotone and in Altamura. In June Cardinal Ruffo entered Naples at the head of its "calabresi". He perfectly understood "his time" and that the overall favourable scenario suggested mercy to the loser, and he made every possible effort to acknowledge the Republicans a status of "fighting counterpart", instead of that of rebel and traitor of the King. But Ferdinando, pushed to this also by the desire of vengeance of the British, chose a line of intransigence and decided the punishment of the heads of the Republicans mostly were members of the Neapolitan aristocracy. Many of them were sentenced to death and hanged in the second half of 1799.
D.2 The "Viva Maria" in Tuscany
Another hotbed of insurrection lighted up in Tuscany, in the area of Arezzo, east of Florence, where an insurrection in the name of the Holy Virgin Mary called itself "Viva Maria!" ("Long live Mary!") blew up spontaneously at springtime 1799. In brief, a second popular army, with the help of British and later Austrian officers we must remind that the northern front had been broken since April , was set up, which was given the name of "Inclita Armata Aretina". This army regrouped peasants, artisans, former officers, soldiers and guards of the Grand Duke. It had a good organization and was able to adequately manoeuvre on the battlefield. Through this army, the movement of "Viva Maria!" in a few months managed to free the whole Tuscany, entering Siena on 28 May and Florence on 5 July, advancing also towards Umbria cities. Only in October 1800, after French gradually re-occupied the Peninsula, Arezzo was besieged, shelled, sacked and submitted.
D.3 The Piedmont and the "Massa Cristiana"
As a third example of co-ordination between insurgence and allied armies I can mention the case of Piedmont. After the break through of the front in Cassano dAdda and the contemporary beginning of retreat of French army of the North to western Piedmont, the main body of the Austro-Russian army, instead of pursuing the French of general Jean Victor Marie Moreau (1761-1813), moved to south-west, in order to prevent from rejoining Moreau and Macdonald, who was going upstream along central Italy. As a consequence of this, the northern part of Piedmont was nearly left behind by allied forces. In this area, a major of the Austrian cavalry, a Hussar, a men native of Lombardia, whose name was Branda de Lucioni (1740-1803), around sixty, took the initiative we still do not know if on his own decision or by order of the Headquarters to organize the countrymen of Piedmont. These were already in revolt against the local, weak republican authorities and military forces, which had entrenched in Turin and in Cuneo, in the South. In a few days, major Lucioni arranged an army, according to the above-depicted model, which called "Ordinata Massa Cristiana". With some six to ten thousand of peasants at his orders and twenty-five to forty not thousand, but units Hussars, he managed to liberate all provinces of Novara, Vercelli and Ivrea, and to light the fire of insurrection in Val dAosta. Not only: he managed also to put under siege the Capital, Turin where thousands of French had barricaded and from where they made sorties against the insurgents only with his countrymen and band of regular horsemen. The adventure of the "Massa Cristiana" like that of Aretins and of Santa Fede lasted however only a few months. Beginning of June 1799, indeed, peasants were convened to a village near Turin and then discharged. Major Lucioni disappeared, despite his victories, angrily hated by the Jacobins and with no sign of recognition from his Staff and from the Sardinian monarchy.
E. The "long march" of French to northern Italy and the bloodiest massacres
Through the three formidable leverages we have seen, the might of the popular insurgence against the French invaders and the Italian Revolution tremendously increased. Thus, the march of French from Naples and Rome to northern Italy became a true Calvary for them and was marked by plenty of new massacres. We can say that Italians took then the opportunity of their new strength and of symmetric weakness of the adversary to settle their accounts with French soldiers and commissioners. The right wing of the French army, which moved to North along the Adriatic Sea through the Abruzzi, was awaited and stopped at Antrodoco pass and raged mountaineers massacred about one thousand of them. Great slaughters took place in coincidence with fixed courses, mountain passes, set roads, etc. The retaliations of French were bloody and brought to a further extent the rage of Italians. We do not know how many Italians died in 1799 massacres. The only reliable figure we have because it comes from a French high rank general is that of sixty thousand victims, before the events of 1799.
This is the sketch of popular insurgence that I love to call "Insurgence", with the initial in capital letter, in analogy with the anti-fascist and anti-nazi Resistance during the years of the "Jacobin" Republics, or the so-called "Triennio Giacobino" 1796-1799.
But the Insurgence continued, here and there, also when apparently the Revolution in France "ended".
When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power and, later, crowned himself as Emperor of the French, despite the outcast of the extreme left of the revolutionary forces, the substitution of the Ancien Régime with a new bureaucratic and individualistic order continued. The universal imposition of the "Code Napoléon" the "order" for Revolution is eloquent to this regard.
So, Italian peasants and lower classes had not many reasons to be happy and to make peace with the new governments. Rebellions went on, often in an endemic form, almost everywhere. A "peak" of revolt occurred for instance in the Apennines near Parma and Piacenza in 1805. Reasons for revolting were more or less everywhere the same: refusal of forced military conscription, protest against a too heavy fiscal pressure and contest of new administrative and political regime for local communities. A significant moment of this second phase of resistance to political change in Italy was the summer of 1809. During 1809 a vast and hard insurrection exploded in Tyrol, which had been occupied by French-Bavarians troops. Head of peasants and mountaineers was a host of the South Tyrol called Andreas Hofer (1767-1810), whose memory is still alive among Tyrols people. On the trail of this huge popular movement, in many areas of northern Italy, especially in Veneto, along the lower course of the Po River near Ferrara and Rovigo , in Valtellina, in Valcamonica a vast people revolt occurred. Thousands of insurgents then attacked the seats of the municipalities, burned and destroyed the newly created police and census archives. Italic Kingdom police and other troops invoked from the various departments of the napoleonic Kingdom had great trouble to repress the rebellion. Napoleonic military courts issued hundreds of sentences to death or to prison and exile.
The complex scenario I tried to depict becomes even more stressed if we think of its quantitative dimension. Information available to day is rather poor, but, nevertheless, rather eloquent. Apart from Sardinia and Sicily islands, which remained under the authority of the legal sovereigns, no region of Italy between 1796 and 1815 was exempt from revolts. Estimations say that more or less three hundred thousand people took part into the popular counter-revolutionary movements during these years. As I mentioned before, some sixty thousand of Italians are estimated to have died before 1799. To understand what this figures really mean, we must consider that the total number of people that died in the whole cycle of Italian independence wars, from 1848 to 1866, is slightly higher than 6.200! And if we assume that the whole population of Italy was then about one fourth of to-days population, so the number of casualties in the Insurgence would be of 240.000 in "current currency". It is an enormous figure indeed, that suggests Insurgence has been the greatest popular movement of the Italian history.
Furthermore, it is not known how many French, Polish and other nationality soldiers died. And I do not take into consideration Italians fallen in napoleonic wars cycle abroad. By the way, this included also operations against the insurgents in Italy and in foreign countries, as in Spain. While Italy did its first experience of freedom, thus, hundreds of Italian town and villages were pilled and fired. Nobody has ever calculated as somebody did for the French Vendée the amount of damages Italy received as a consequence of its liberation. Nobody knows how many homes were burned, how many crops were destroyed, what was the value of artistic and religious treasures which "left" Italy and never got back, as well as the amount of resources in any form that were "officially" or "privately" literally stolen, sometimes as a revenge for insurgence. In many rural areas of northern Italy it has been documented that war, occupation and forced military conscription created a true famine situation and an authentic starvation. Resistance of peasants to Revolution was also nourished by the damage they suffered when abbeys, monasteries and convents that were also important institutions for sustenance, sanitary aid and charity for lower classes in the rural areas were suppressed. A general popular insurgence gets even more relief if we think that the geography of the country was definitely not in its favour. Italy has a lot of mountains, communications lines at the end of XVIII century were poor, political fragmentation implied many barriers, the traditional "campanilismo" that is the rivalry between towns, that dated back to the roman and medieval age and finally the plurality of local cultures reflected by the number of dialects were spoken and the wide difference in customs: all these factors played a negative role in respect of a general popular movement. If this could have happened, this means that a common unifying factor must have played a determinant role. This factor can be located in ideas and implementations of French Revolution, which showed up identical everywhere French bayonets arrived. Revolution in Italy was at that time one reality: for this reason it makes more sense to speak of "an Insurgence" instead of individual, spontaneous and self-explanatory episodes of reaction, as a certain contemporary historiography tends to do. Insurgence of course got the form of individual reactions, possibly with no link from a village to another, but insurgents here and there had the same motivational background and this was hostility to revolutionary change.
Insurgence was not only an Italian reality. As outlined, wherever ideas of 1789 advanced "on the edge of French bayonets" and "Freedom" and "Equality" replaced "freedoms" and "hierarchy", people grasped arms to resist. This happened in countries as Switzerland, where relatively famous is French massacre in Nidwald, where they killed some four hundred women and children in 1798. This is the case of Belgium, of Germany, of the island of Malta, of Istria peninsula, and eventually of Spain. In Spain a great popular and national liberation war occurred between 1808 and 1814. French had to employ tens of thousand of men, many of whom were Italians, to repress the revolt, but finally failed, due also to support provided by British troops to insurgents. Casualties of this lasting and wild civil war could be counted in thousands.
This trans-national dimension of Insurgence reinforces the general interpretation we use to give to it. Insurgence was not the sum of local episodes, having dissimilar immediate causes, but a huge, common and general movement of resistance to social and political change, at sunset of the Ancien Régime. What survived mostly in hearts of this sacral, hierarchical and polymorphous political regime reacted, as an organism aggressed by a pathogenic agent, when change implied a "paradigm shift" in social organization, a dramatic and quick change of mentality and customs and was achieved in revolutionary and breaking forms.
On the basis of what has been said, the "golden legend" about the making of modern Italy has therefore a hidden face.
By the way, "more" hidden in France and Italy than elsewhere. In Spain, in Germany and in Tyrol Insurgence is told in schoolbooks, although in a simple liberation, patriotic and more or less nationalistic perspective. And it is even stranger that Italy and France left intentionally an historical page blank, if we think that the specimen of all peasant revolts, the "Vendée", took place in France and Insurgence in Italy was probably the greatest opposition to French Revolution ever occurred.
Insurgence is of course also a patriotic and liberation movement, but it must be seen more a huge popular movement of refuse and resistance to modernization. Both in legal and illegal forms, it continued as opposition to Risorgimento beyond napoleonic age till at least the years Seventies of XIX century: so must be interpreted with a broader view and in the frame of overall national histories and of European history.
For Italy, if we continue to ignore that our history has a "hidden face", if we go on interpreting the making of modern Italy as a "triumph march" of 1789 progressive ideas, despite any objection and resistance, if we do not criticize non-senses like that of a popular consensus to Risorgimento, we run the risk to justify and excuse the whole XIX and XX century process of Italian history as it was. Continuing to see only lights and not shadows of our past means also to insist in an obsolete political perspective: historia magistra vitae and particularly of political life. A perspective that definitely discards true desires, questions, ideals, values that at that time were claimed by European and Italian insurgents with the arms at hand and to-day are still the values of a number of Italians. They reflect non-secondary elements of a religious view of the human being and his life and, more precisely, the principles of natural right, i. e. what to day is called fundamental human rights. It is a platform of values spontaneously originated from the culture of the majority of people. It is maybe difficult for the Anglo-Saxon culture, where modernization was the outcome of a long, gradual and shared process of change, to understand this, but it is nevertheless true. At present in Italy there is a debate upon the necessity and urgency to work out a new set of rules for civil cohabitation. It will be also possible that these views and principles be welcomed in a future possible new Constitution. But Italians must abandon a certain narrow-minded inflexibly progressive mentality, that insists on a national history which is not and never has been true.
In past four years there has been one more opportunity to start a re-thinking process of Italian late modern history. Between 1996 and 1999 fell the second centenary of "Jacobin" Republics, as well as of Italian popular insurgence in its first period.
Results of celebrations have not been much encouraging. We have seen once again Italy split in two parts, the "legal country" opposed to the "real country", as once somebody used to say. The official country has celebrated republics and Jacobins, while the real country committees, foundations, but also small municipalities showed more interest to popular insurgence. And this did not depend on ideological reasons: in the hundreds of Italian villages there is no large survival of Ancien Régime fans. Celebrations depended on the fact that a maybe pale memory of what happened during napoleonic years still survived here and there. It was mostly a memory of pillages, of fires and massacres: there is a village in the Marche, where one can still see French bullets holes in city walls. Personally I have met many committees for the memory, from Piedmont down to Marche and to Altamura in Puglia. A conference of six of them was also arranged in Milan.
Despite the indifference or sometimes the hostility of the cultural and political "establishment", and thanks to the efforts of privates not very rich indeed , in coincidence with the bi-centenary it was possible to publish or re-edit important studies, that give a more precise picture of what Italian popular anti-napoleonic insurgence has been. This blooming of new studies and essays made more difficult to official cultural establishment to re-launch the usual oleographic interpretation of history and also to behave as if nothing had happened. Italian media have showed a limited interest to facts and celebrations, while a very few "enlightened" university professors began to give their students degree thesis and dissertations upon the Insurgence. In any case it is a result, even if we must admit that we are still at the pre-history of a serious historiography of popular movements in the Risorgimento age.
For those that have good reasons to share the values of the insurgents or interpret the modern age as a process of gradual and progressive detachment from a model of society exemplar from the teaching of Church and catholic thought point of view, the interest to Insurgence is permanent. But, if the above-depicted scenario is true, to study and document the popular insurgence should be a priority also, shall we say, for all "men of good will" with other ideal positions.
In this view and to this purpose, in late 1995 the Istituto per la Storia delle Insorgenze was founded in Milan.
The mission of this private and with no view to profit institution is to make research, to organize data in interpretations i. e. to make history and to make the results of research activity known to the large public, under the overall control of a scholarly steering committee made by university professors. Institutes views diffusion is made by mean of a periodical newsletter called Nota Informativa , a Web site collecting all news, activities, publications, images, etc. concerning the Insurgence and the Institute, through lectures, conferences and meetings. Up to date the Institute has published three new books and re-edited two historical "classics" about popular insurgence. Within the scope of its action falls also the effort of creating links with all groups and associations that deal for any reason with the popular movements, in Italy and elsewhere.
At the end of this summary explanation of what popular insurgence in Italy has been, I would like to stress that study of Insurgence is one of the most challenging domain for research offered to-day to historians. We can see it like an iceberg, whose emerged part is only a minimal part of its mass. Further to facts, we must know who were the leaders, determine how much was the cost from a human and material standpoint. We must also assess which was the ideology implied in insurgence, study the resistance of populations in a sociology of classes, culture and religions view. I believe this kind of reality must be studied only in a multi-disciplinary approach and I feel urgent to underline that since it has been a trans-national reality it will be adequately interpreted and understood only if approached in a pan-European view. Insurgence is also a "node" around which different cultures and different historyographic approaches are confronting: it is therefore an increasing opportunity to increase the exchange of views for those which have different positions and are part of different schools.
Whoever wants to reach a more complete and non-ideological view of how contemporary Europe grew up and is being made, is invited to take part to this effort.
Oscar Sanguinetti