A short history of Venice

Giovanni Scarabello

• Editore: Pacini Editore
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9788863153804
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia italiana

La storia di Venezia come città-stato è lunga quasi mille anni. Questo volume, che continua la tradizione delle Brevi storie delle città italiane, rappresenta una breve ma completa sintesi delle sue vicende storiche, dalle antichissime origini ai giorni nostri. Il volume, scritto con uno stile semplice e scorrevole, rappresenta una novità assoluta nel campo dell'editoria in quanto ne sono autori due tra i maggiori specialisti di storia veneziana. La Breve storia di Venezia può essere apprezzata dallo studente che desidera rivisitare il passato della città alla luce del presente, dal turista interessato ai suoi caratteri originali e al suo evolversi nel corso dei secoli oppure dallo stesso cittadino veneziano che si scoraggerebbe di fronte ad un'ampia trattazione ma che vuole approfondire la conoscenza di una città unica al mondo.

The end of the Republic and the democratic Municipality of 1797

The French Revolution set in motion the events that were to carry the old Venetian state out of history.

After it became clear that the revolution had succeeded in ’89-90, Venice continued her policy of standing equidistant from France and Austria and did not enter the first anti-French coalition; on the contrary, she tried as hard to overcome every difficulty that stood in the way of re-establishing diplomatic relations with France as the changes in that country’s institutions required.

Naturally, above all after ’93, the Venetian government intensified its vigilance against the dangers of a massive infiltration of revolutionary ideas. Alarm and repression were out of all proportion to the size of the little groups who were anxious for changes in the institutions which were so weak in the Venetian state.

In 1795, when year III of the revolutionary period ended with the proclamation of the constitution, the government of the Directoire was established in France. The country found itself still at war with the rest of the first coalition. The most important front was in Germany, on the Rhine. It was decided, at the end of the year, to transform the Italian front into a real second front. The general appointed to command the army that was raised to fight in Italy was the young Napoleon Bonaparte.

From January 1796 the Venetian representative in Paris, Alvise Querini, began to keep Venice informed of the French preparations for war. His dispatches were very intelligent and lucid, like those of his predecessors Almorò Pisani and Antonio Capello, who had forecast, described and interpreted the revolutionary events of the preceding years. Diplomacy had always been a strong point of the Venetians (centuries of European history are to be found in the dispatches and reports of Venetian ambassadors).

In the spring of 1796 the French armies who had entered Italy defeated the Piedmontese, attacked Austrian Lombardy and occupied Milan. The Austrians dug themselves in at Mantua and began to flood over Veneto. The Republic declared its neutrality, but it could not prevent the Austrians, as they retreated, or the French as they pursued them, from entering Venetian territory.

In August and September Italy was inundated with fresh Austrian armies, which Napoleon almost routinely defeated. The Veronese region, the Trentino and the Brenta valley were the chief theatres of war: there were battles at Bassano, Primolano and Friuli. At the end of the year, and then in the early months of 1797, on the strength of battles fought and won (Mantua, which had been besieged, fell on 2nd February), Napoleon won the military and political advantage that allowed him to treat with the Austrians at Leoben (18th April) for the preliminaries to peace, which, among other things, provided, in secret clauses, for territorial compensation to be made at the expense of the Republic.

The treaty was discussed in Venice in all the most important councils. There was no lack of people who thought about a pro-Austrian policy opposed to the settlement, or of those who were on the whole inclined to favour a pro-French policy. All the same, the greater part of the numerous ruling class understood the situation, with varying degrees of clarity, more or less in these terms: the Republic, regardless of any comparison with the new France, was incurably old; the survival of Venice depended on the balance of power in Europe, and that was now gone, leaving Austria and France eager to make themselves masters of Venice’s remains, whether in the guise of ally and protector or in that of enemy; all resistance, therefore, was useless: it would only bring death and destruction.

In Veneto, meanwhile, the people were living through terrible experiences: their property was requisitioned (though paid for); their food was taken to provision the invading army, who committed violent outrage of all kinds; and they had to endure the arrogance of Napoleon, who received the Venetian representatives with abuse and bad manners that, even before making them angry, astounded them, making them feel the irremediable distance separating the old world, which they belonged to, from the new world the invaders had brought from France.

In the cities on the Lombard side of the Venetian state, at Bergamo on 12-13th March 1797, at Brescia on 17-18th March; at Salò on 25th March and at Crema on 27th, small groups of local worthies, covered by the French, took over the government of the cities, setting up democratic municipalities. They were ex-nobles, men of business and professional men, some of them with property and some of them intellectuals, including a few priests.

The Venetian Rectors of the cities hurriedly surrendered, but when the leaders of the municipalities of Brescia and Bergamo appeared in the valleys and the countryside to democratise them, the peasants opposed them and with the emblem of St Mark, cut out of posters and stuck on their caps, chased them away and began to resist the French too.

After the preliminary peace talks in Leoben, Napoleon needed a free hand. In order to make war on the Republic he had recourse to provocation and pretexts: a false proclamation signed by the Venetian Provveditore of the terraferma, urging resistance to the French; the killing of the consul of France at Zante; the insurrection of Verona against Napoleon’s troops between 17th and 25th April; the sinking of the vessel Libérateur d’Italie which had tried to force a way into the port of the Lido. At last, on 1st May, he succeeded in declaring war.

After the Veronese rebels had been obliged to surrender, and a democratic municipality had been set up in Verona, the peasant militias of Vicenza (for the most part from the Seven Comuni) who had come to the help of the Veronese, dispersed. On the evening of 26th April the Venetian Rector of Vicenza left the city alone, on foot, and walked towards Padua. In Vicenza, on 27th April, the French entered the city and set up a democratic municipality. On 28th April it was Padua’s turn. All the cities and towns of Veneto were covered with a fine network of provisional democratic municipalities.

Between the 1st and the 12 May 1797 there was a continuous feverish attempt to negotiate the end of the business. Napoleon had to be treated with wherever he could be found: in Padua, it might be, with General Victor; with the Commander of the French at Mestre; with the emaciated little group of so-called Venetian “Jacobins” (their meeting centre was the Ferratini house at San Polo); with the secretary of the French Embassy in Venice, Giuseppe Villetard.

At last 12th May arrived. At break of day Andrea Spada (an ex-customs officer who was one of the leaders of the democrats) sent a note to the Great Council, which had met for the purpose of reaching a decision. In it he summarised the conditions communicated by Napoleon’s headquarters in Milan. The demands were short and sharp: the installation of a representative government in Venice was indispensable; such a government could not be combined with a patrician class; Bonaparte wanted democracy to be established without delay; if the Venetians did not do it, the French would come and do it for them.

While one of the members of the Great Council was expounding the ultimatum, somewhat verbosely, to his colleagues, from outside, from the Piazzetta di S. Marco where the troops recruited by Schiavoni were embarking, came the sound of a fusillade of musketry, which they fired by way of salute to the city. It was enough to throw everyone into a panic. The councillors shouted, “That’s enough! That’s enough! Be gone!” The decree was put to the vote and was approved by a majority of more than five hundred. Thus did the patrician ruling class “adopt the system of the proposed provisional representative government”, bringing to an end a state that was almost a thousand years old.

Power was formally handed over to the new municipality by the old patrician government with an exchange of declarations. The new government was organized in the same way as the new democratic municipalities of the terraferma, with an assembly of about sixty members and eight committees: Public Welfare; the Military; Health; Finance and the Mint; Shipbuilding and the Navy; Banks, Commerce and Guilds; Grants and Benefits; Education.

The political and social climate of the summer of 1797 in the towns and cities of Veneto was extraordinary. It was a climate of new possibilities, freedom of discussion, effervescence, search for identity on the part of various groups of the population, visions of what power could mean. There were constant meetings of the assembly, public and otherwise; meetings of the committees; speeches in the various tribunes; newspapers, pamphlets, proclamations; patriotic theatrical performances, huge placards painted with patriotic pictures and captions; ritualised trees of liberty; a revival of symbols and names; it was in part the culture of politics, in part the politics of culture, in part a cultural revolution. There was furious and wide-ranging debate, comparable with many in the past and, still more, with those that would later be created by the advent of the Austrians. A lot of changes had to be made in many branches of administration (public finance, justice, the political representation of the people, …), and there was a lot of ideological and philosophical discussion. In a very short time an enormous quantity of pamphlets, minutes of municipality meetings and newspapers had accumulated. Debate was more than ample, even if it was for the most part nourished and guided in a moderate direction by the middle classes who, on the whole, left their imprint on municipal power, showing that they had learnt a considerable amount of administrative and political know-how from the model provided by the revolutionary French in ’95. Here and there, there was a debate raised by the contributions, at times very significant, of intellectuals of a new stamp, such as Ugo Foscolo or Vincenzo Dandolo, who were to animate the public education societies (Venetian education was important) as centres of relatively radical political and cultural agitation, inspired by the premises of the Enlightenment and the principles of ’89.

On 17th October, at Campoformio (or rather, at Passariano) a peace treaty was signed between Napoleon and Austria. Austria received Veneto, Istria and Dalmatia, while Bergamo, Brescia and Crema were handed over to the Cisalpine Republic (recognised by Austria). France took the Ionic islands and a certain amount of Albanian territory which had belonged to the Venetian Republic.

It was the end of independence for Venice and Veneto.

The nineteenth century and foreign domination: Austria - Napoleon - Austria

With the events of 1797 the Venetian state made its exit from history. Venice became simply a city involved in the affairs of other states.

On 18th January 1798 the first units of the army of occupation settled down in the city. After a brief period of transition, an Imperial government answerable to Vienna was set up. Leading members of the one-time patrician class and of the one-time democratic municipality were absorbed into the new administration. In the brief interlude of democratic government that the various sectors of the population had enjoyed in 1797, they had glimpsed the possible realisation of social and political aspirations, but the absolutist Austrian system put an end to that. In 1800 Venice hosted the long conclave which ended with the election of Pope Pius VII.

Only after 1803 did Vienna proceed to a more clearly defined administrative system in the Venetian provinces, partly because the political and military climate of Italy was uncertain; but at the end of 1805 and the beginning of 1806, in accordance with the Treaty of Presburg (which sealed a series of French victories over the Austrians), Veneto became part of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, of which Milan was the capital. Napoleon had proclaimed himself not only Emperor of the French but also King of Italy, in 1803.

During the first decade of the century a series of big changes were made in the economic administration of Venice: there was development of the free port, the Arsenal (shipyard), the port services and the lagoon defences; the Chamber of Commerce was relaunched and public funding was increased. The city buildings were also extensively altered: some were demolished, others gutted, palaces were prepared for public receptions, gardens and open spaces were created and adorned with monumental statues. The ancient system of public assistance was liquidated, as were the corporate institutions and the ecclesiastical, too, in part. It was an important moment for neoclassicism (Canova, at least, must be mentioned). Venice and Veneto now began to have experience of contact with a modern system of government – watchful, aware of what was going on, in control – an experience that was part good and part bad. To be subject to military conscription was traumatic, especially for those who found themselves having to pay in their own person for someone else’s military glory.

After Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, the political and military situation was changed in Italy, as elsewhere. For the nth time, Venetian territory became a theatre of war. Between October 1813 and April 1814 Venice was besieged from the sea by the English and on land by the Austrians. When Napoleon’s armies were dispersed everywhere, following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Veneto became once more an Austrian province.

Between 1815 and 1866 Venice was part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto, ruled by two Governors who presided over government Colleges, one in Milan and one in Venice, under the Austrian crown. Many of the administrative and economic institutions introduced by the Napoleonic government continued. Primary education improved. The economy grew, particularly in Lombardy, in spite of strong fiscal pressure. Although centralisation in Vienna increased, at local level the bureaucracy made further strides towards a modern and functional organisation of men and things. Venice was constantly given objectives for development, and if, in the first twenty years, social conditions became much worse, with a marked demographic decline, increased unemployment and poverty, impoverishment of industry and crafts, reduction of construction work and shipbuilding, from the end of the thirties the city’s economy began to look up. The free port was extended, important public works were undertaken (for example, the infrastructure of the port), the railway bridge across the lagoon was begun in 1846, and tourism continued to make quite a considerable contribution to the city’s prosperity. In 1847 the ninth Congress of Italian Scientists was held in Venice. In some ways it was a defiance of Austria and a celebration of the lost independence of the Venetian Republic.

Although several middle-class groups were amassing substantial fortunes and setting themselves up as financiers, no broad-based and enterprising middle class, conscious of itself, emerged. Perhaps partly for this reason, political opposition to the state of things was weaker in Venice than elsewhere. All the same, when an opportunity arose for a general Italian and European movement of rebellion, with the watchword “national independence”, a considerable number of landowners, professional men, intellectuals and patriots, supported by substantial numbers of the common people, was able, in M...

Indice dei contenuti

• The “Venetia” that preceded Venice
• The myth of creation from nothing
• The foundations of the new Venice
• Towards autonomy, under Byzantine colours
• After the Longobards, the Franks
• The city of Venice is born
• Between Saracens and Slavs: the difficulties of the ninth century
• Half a century of peace, until the Candian squall and the Turks
• Pietro II Orseolo and the characteristics of an exceptional society
• Towards a new balance of forces in the eleventh century
• The crusade intrigue and great power status
• “Comune Veneciarum”
• The established city
• The fourth crusade. “Dominators of the fourth part and half the Empire”
• The end of the thirteenth century: new problems and new opportunities
• The Great Council’s “lock-out” and the beginning of the aristocratic republic
• A hundred years of war with Genoa for the hegemony of trade with the Levant
• Commerce
• Ships
• The fifteenth century, the “land state”
• The Turks
• Crisis in the first decade of the sixteenth century. “Reflection”
• Venice the great city
• Lepanto
• Venice versus Rome
• The war for Candia and the reconquest of Morea
• Eighteenth-century senescence
• The end of the Republic and the democratic Municipality of 1797
• The nineteenth century and foreign domination: Austria - Napoleon - Austria
• In the kingdom of Italy
• From the post-war period to the present day