Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Vandiver Nicassio is professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the author of many books, including Tosca’s Rome, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Imperial City

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................7Cast of Characters....................................................9Chapter One: Urbe et Orbe: The City and the World.....................13Chapter Two: The City.................................................31Chapter Three: The People.............................................55Chapter Four: Joys....................................................81Chapter Five: The Turning Year........................................107Chapter Six: Sorrows..................................................131Chapter Seven: Money, School and Work.................................151Chapter Eight: The New Regime.........................................171Chapter Nine: The Empire Versus God...................................195Chapter Ten: Restorations.............................................215Bibliographical Essay.................................................237Bibliography..........................................................245Index of Names........................................................253

Chapter One

In July of 1796, a strange phenomenon was reported in the popular districts of Rome.

Romans traditionally prayed that the Madonna might 'turn her eyes towards them', and now it seemed as if their prayers had been answered in a notably literal way. Marian miracles, already reported in the provincial towns of Ancona and in the Marches, began to occur in Rome itself: in the street-side shrines, the eyes of the madonnas seemed to come alive, moving in their painted faces to look up in supplication, down in grief, or side to side to take in with love and pity the people who clustered around. At the bedside of an elderly nun, it was reported, the radical physician Liborio Angelucci cried out in alarm and fled from the room as the icon above the sick woman looked at him with reproach and gentle disdain. As French invasion seemed to grow ever more inevitable carnival was cancelled in favour of barefoot penitential processions led by cardinals and bishops, and the exposition of relics. None of this would be of any use. Nor would diplomacy, or barely disguised bribery. By 1798 Rome would fall to the armies of revolutionary France; in 1809, Rome would be absorbed into the empire as an imperial city, and ruled directly as if it were part of France. The French in one guise or another would dominate the city until 1814.

In the summer of 1796 Rome stood, as she always had, on the banks of the Tiber, enclosing within her walls the battered glories of the ancient empire of the West, the heart of Catholic Christendom, and a population who considered themselves citizens of the capital of the world. She was a little shabby, more than a little down at the heels. Her theocratic government was hopelessly old-fashioned even before the French Revolution; her economy was a shambling wreck despite the intermittent efforts at reform by a string of popes; her prisons and her hospitals were shining examples of the best that Europe could produce while her universities were outdated, her law courts were strangled in overlapping jurisdictions, and the most charitable thing to say about her police and army is to say nothing at all.

Late eighteenth-century Rome was ruled by the pope, an elected monarch who, in addition to being head of the universal Church, was also the king of the Papal States. These states ran, or straggled, from Terracina and Gaëta in the south, on the edge of the Kingdom of Naples, across central Italy north and east to the borders of Modena and the Republic of Venice. They were a hodgepodge of territories, states and cities including the Legations of the Romagna, Ferrara and Bologna, the Marches, the ports of Ancona and Civitavecchia, and decrepit but once great Renaissance cities like Perugia, Orvieto and Urbino. The pope, usually elderly, ruled along with his often elderly cardinals who served as heads of government departments; the cardinals in turn depended on a semi-clerical body of middle-rank administrators called prelates; and working for the prelates were the secretaries. The whole structure creaked along, increasingly outmoded but apparently eternal. The system was the object of universal scorn among international observers; it was maddening for the few Romans who had an eye for progress; but it was surprisingly popular with the people as a whole.

Eighteenth-century popes had been mild and benevolent rulers. Most had at least attempted to be good shepherds to their city and their world. But while their city remained much the same, by the last decades of the century the world had changed dramatically. The defences of Rome had for a long time been more spiritual than physical, and by 1796 they were clearly on the point of crumbling.

France has a long history, going back to Clovis and then to Charlemagne, of 'protecting' the papacy, with or without the papacy's cooperation. By the Renaissance, Italy was an irresistible prize – rich and virtually undefended, consisting of dozens of small, often mutually hostile, states. The French, the Spanish, and various combinations of German-speakers dominated or outright snatched convenient pieces, and Italy was the treasure chest from which victors were rewarded in European wars. When the balance of peace in Europe was disturbed, the Italian states were inevitably troubled. But what began in France with the fall of the Bastille and continued, changing but not stopping, for the next 25 years until the fall of Napoleon, was far more than a disturbance. A new world was being born, a world that would be the antithesis of everything that Rome represented.

The new world would be much concerned with reason and progress; in Rome, reason would only be valued as a means to faith, while the right to remain unchanged was sacred.

In the new world the state spoke in the name of the people, and in that name claimed the right to change itself and its prerogatives profoundly; in Rome, the state spoke in the name of God, and in that Name the people claimed the right to change not at all, and bitterly resisted any attempts to make them do so.

The new world dissolved the corporations that stood guard between man and the state, be they guilds or extended families; Rome was a corporation and, in the pre-modern sense, a family.

The new world was led by the iron will of a genius whose prerogatives were in theory limited by the will of the people but whose powers were curtailed hardly at all; Rome was governed by a geriatric collection of vaguely benevolent amateurs headed by an elected sovereign whose prerogatives were, in theory, absolute but whose powers were severely curtailed by an entrenched bureaucracy (the curia) and a crushing weight of inertia.

In the new world wealth was exalted and poverty was crime; in Rome, one revelled in the display of wealth, but poverty bore the mark of the Most Holy, a fact that gave the poor an annoying attitude of self-contained superiority.

Most fatally, the new world would be much concerned with military might; for at least a century, Rome's army had been a running joke. It was small, ineffectual, top-heavy with superannuated officers, and existed primarily for parades and to provide guards for theatres and troops for policing the carnival.

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