French Lessons of Terror for the People of Italy. Suppression of the Revolts in Pavia and Lugo, 1796

The author of the article studied the suppression of the popular uprisings of 1796 in the cities of Pavia (Lombardy) and Lugo (Romagna) by the French. The article shows that historians of Italy and France adhered for a long time to fundamentally different interpretations of these events and used different sources: in France these were official texts of the Directory period and occasionally materials from the military-historical archive in Paris (SHDAT, Vincennes), in Italy — authentic Italian sources (chronicles, pamphlets, newspapers, private correspondence, eyewitness diaries, etc.). Only since the 1930s researchers from various countries began to analyze the uprisings of 1796 in a comprehensive manner and on the basis of a far wider source base. In Russian historiography, these episodes of the Insorgenza of 1796 have not been studied before. The uprisings in Pavia and Lugo cannot be considered in isolation from other similar events in Northern Italy. An analysis of the sources shows that their causes were similar: robberies, military requisitions, confiscation of church valuables, and the violent imposition of radical innovations in political life on the local population. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the factor of church anti-revolutionary propaganda, which was spread thanks to the efforts of the Holy See. The French army and its commanders Bonaparte, Augereau, and Lannes used in Italy the extremely cruel methods of suppressing popular uprisings that had been previously tested in France. Bonaparte even declared the need to teach the people of Italy “lessons of terror”. The author of the article believes that the methods of armed suppression of popular resistance in 1796 did not become prototypes of the methods of military and police control in the later period of 1800–1814. On the contrary, in 1796, the French behaved in Italy as if they were in conquered territories and did not yet regard the rebellious population as “new Frenchmen”. The looting of large cities and the burning of villages, the taking and internment of hostages from among the nobility and urban patriciate, and the collection of large monetary contributions confirm this conclusion. The Italian elites then mostly cooperated with the conquerors, and the bloody suppression of popular uprisings led at that time to a decrease in the protest activity of the “lower classes”, as a result of which after 1796 there were no more any big anti-French uprisings, at least in Lombardy

European Political History Analysis · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society