Fall of the Republic of Venice

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Fall of the Republic of Venice ended on the morning of the 12th of May 1797, when a quorum-less gathering of terrified patricians voted to dissolve a state that had existed for approximately 1,100 years. The man who opened that final session was Doge Ludovico Manin. His words carried no defiance. They carried resignation. He told the council that they were surrounded by sixty thousand men and that iron and fire awaited those who refused to comply. Outside, the crowd that gathered in St Mark's Square did not cheer the end of the Republic. They cried Viva San Marco. They raised the Flag of St Mark on the three masts. They tried to reinstate the Doge. What does it mean when a republic abolishes itself while its own people beg it to survive? And how did one of the most durable states in European history come undone in little more than a year?

• 2. Napoleon's Italian Gambit

  ›

  In April 1796, General Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps with 45,000 men on what the Directory in Paris framed as a diversionary attack against Austria through northern Italy. The principal offensive was meant to go east over the Rhine. Venice was not the target. Venice was the road.

  The Republic had followed its traditional policy of neutrality for centuries, but its mainland possessions, the Domini di Terraferma, lay directly across the path of Napoleon's advance toward Vienna. The Venetians could not say no to a French army of that size. So they said yes reluctantly, and watched as the war they had refused to join came to them anyway.

  Napoleon moved fast. He knocked Sardinia out of the war in the Montenotte campaign, entered Milan after the Battle of Lodi, and forced King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia to sign what the source calls a humiliating Treaty of Paris. Archduke Ferdinand, the Austrian governor of Milan, fled with his family to Bergamo, inside Venetian territory. The Habsburg forces withdrew to defend the Prince-Bishopric of Trent. By the 17th of May, the Duchy of Modena had sought an armistice. Austria's position in northern Italy was collapsing, and every step of that collapse happened on Venetian soil.

  The Venetian Senate had not been idle. As early as the 12th of May 1796, it created a provveditore generale for the Terraferma, appointing Nicolò Foscarini to oversee all mainland magistrates. But the state of Venetian defences was, as the source puts it, parlous: arms were lacking and fortifications were in disrepair. The Venetian armed forces were depleted. They were hardly a match for the battle-tested French or even a local uprising. Foscarini's new authority was real on paper. In practice, he was managing a retreat.

• 3. The Erosion of Neutrality

  ›

  On the 1st of June 1796, Foscarini agreed to allow French troops into Verona. That decision did not save Venice from Napoleon's ire; it simply opened the door. Within weeks the Republic's territories had officially become a battlefield.

  The French covertly began supporting Jacobin revolutionaries inside Venice's borders. The Venetian Senate started quiet preparations for war. New taxes were raised. Voluntary contributions were requested to rearm the state. The cernide militia was conscripted in Istria. A provveditore generale for the Venetian Lagoon and Lido was created to protect the Dogado, the core of the Venetian state itself. The Republic also ordered its ambassador at Paris to protest the violation of its neutrality, while its diplomats in Vienna remonstrated about the Habsburgs bringing war to the Terraferma. Venice was protesting to both sides simultaneously, which was a measure of how exposed it had become.

  On the 5th of July 1796, the provedditore responsible for lagoon defence, Giacomo Nani, wrote a passage that the source preserves in full. Recalling Venice's victorious War of the Morea against the Ottoman Turks just a century earlier, Nani said it mortified his soul to see the Republic reduced to thinking only about the defence of the estuary. That letter was not merely strategic despair. It was the acknowledgment that a power which had once projected naval force across the eastern Mediterranean was now struggling to hold its own coastline.

  The French and Austrian forces concluded a truce in July, and French troops quartered themselves in Crema, Brescia, and Bergamo. Meanwhile, France pressed Venice to abandon its neutrality and join an alliance with France and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. The Doge formally rejected those proposals in a letter on the 22nd of July. The window for any kind of diplomatic alignment had closed.

• 4. Revolt and the Veronese Easter

  ›

  With the capture of Mantua on the 2nd of February 1797, the last bastion of Habsburg resistance in Italy fell. Napoleon no longer needed to maintain pretenses. The French dropped any facade and overtly called for revolution among the territories of Venice.

  Bergamo rose in revolt against Venice on the 13th of March, establishing the Republic of Bergamo, under pressure from general Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers. The provveditore extraordinary Francesco Battagia issued a general amnesty three days later in an effort to restore order. But Battagia already feared losing Brescia. On the 18th of March, a group of Brescia notables, desiring to free themselves from Venetian rule, launched a revolt. The French controlled the city's citadel. Battagia, unwilling to endanger the population, which was still largely pro-Venetian, abandoned the city with his troops.

  Meanwhile, in the Venetian Senate's own assessment, relayed by the Inquisitori di Stato on the 19th of March, Padua and Treviso were quiet, Verona's population was described as disinclined toward the French, and Bergamo was in rebellion. The report was obsolete before it was finished. By the 21st of March, Treviso proclaimed its loyalty to Venice. Vicenza and Padua followed on the 24th. Verona, Bassano, Rovigo, and other centres sent new pledges of allegiance shortly after. Delegations came from the valleys of Bergamo, ready to rise against the French.

  Then, on the 17th of April 1797, Napoleon signed a preliminary armistice at Leoben in Styria with the representatives of Habsburg Francis II. Secret annexes conceded the Terraferma to Austria in exchange for the Austrian Netherlands. France had already traded Venice. Nobody told Venice.

  On the same day, the population of Verona and part of the Venetian troops stationed there rose in revolt against the French occupiers, an episode the source calls the Veronese Easter. The French were pushed to the defensive and reduced to holding the city's forts. On the 20th of April, a French frigate tried to enter the Porto di Lido, the northern entry to the Lagoon. The artillery on the Fort of Sant'Andrea opened fire, sinking the ship and killing its captain. The Venetian government still hesitated. It refused to mobilize the army or send reinforcements to Verona, which was forced to capitulate on the 24th of April.

• 5. The Last Session

  ›

  On the 25th of April 1797, the feast day of Venice's patron Mark the Evangelist, Napoleon threatened Venetian emissaries at Graz that he would be an Attila to the state of Venice. He claimed to have 80,000 men and twenty gunships ready to overthrow the Republic. He accused Venice of having refused a French alliance with the sole purpose of cutting the path of retreat for his army in the event of defeat.

  On the 4th of May, the Great Council of Venice voted with 704 in favour, 12 against, and 26 abstentions to accept the French demands, including the arrest of the commandant of the Fort of Sant'Andrea and the three Inquisitori di Stato. That vote did not end the Republic. It only delayed the final session.

  By the morning of the 11th of May, in the penultimate convocation of the Great Council, Doge Manin told the assembled patricians that they were not secure even in their own bed. The next morning, with only 537 of the 1,200 full members present and therefore without a quorum, Manin opened the final session. He spoke of a distressed and troubled soul. He noted that they were encircled by sixty thousand men. He closed by asking the council to always turn to God and His most holy Mother.

  The French demands brought before the council by Venetian Jacobins included the abdication of the government in favour of a Provisional Municipality, the planting of a tree of liberty in St Mark's Square, the arrival of 4,000 French soldiers, and the handover of magistrates who had championed resistance. The vote to abolish the Republic passed 512 in favour, 5 abstentions, and 20 against. The terror in the assembly was not metaphorical. During the session, gunshots from the square threw the council into panic. The shots were, in fact, the loyal Schiavoni troops firing their muskets in salutation of the Banner of Saint Mark as they embarked on a ship. The patricians thought it was a popular revolt and rushed the vote.

• 6. Plunder and Transfer

  ›

  On the 16th of May 1797, the Provisional Municipality of Venice issued a proclamation from the Ducal Palace, in the hall where the Great Council had always convened. The text announced, with remarkable optimism, that Venetian nobles were voluntarily renouncing their hereditary right to govern so that the most meritorious of the entire nation could enter public service. The proclamation described this as a glorious sacrifice. On the same day at Milan, a peace treaty was signed, and the first foreign troops to set foot in Venice since the Republic's founding entered the city.

  On the 11th of July, the Ghetto of Venice was abolished and the city's Jews were given freedom to move about freely. On the 13th of June, the French, fearing the Provisional Municipality could not hold Corfu, sailed from Venice to depose the Venetian provveditore generale da Mar, Carlo Aurelio Widmann, and establish a democratic regime there. The Provisional Municipality of the Ionian Islands was established on the 27th of June.

  The Treaty of Campoformio was signed on the 17th of October. On the 28th of October, Venice voted on whether to accept the French decision to hand the city to Austria: of 23,568 votes, 10,843 were for submitting. The Provisional Municipality sent envoys to Paris to resist. Those envoys were arrested in Milan and sent home.

  What followed was systematic destruction. Of the 184 ships in the Arsenal, those already equipped were sent to Toulon and the rest were scuttled. Two thousand Arsenal workers were dismissed. The Arsenal complex itself was burned down. Churches, convents, and palazzi were stripped of valuables and artworks. The state mint and the treasury of St Mark's Basilica were confiscated. The Bucintoro, the Doge's ceremonial galley, was denuded of its sculptures, which were burned on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to recover their gold leaf. The bronze Horses of Saint Mark were carried to Paris. Private citizens were imprisoned and forced to hand over their wealth in exchange for release. Austrian troops entered the city on the 18th of January 1798 and ended the plunder.

• 7. What Came After

  ›

  Austria's possession of Venice lasted until the Treaty of Pressburg on the 26th of December 1805, which ceded the Venetian Province and Dalmatia to Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy. Napoleon had by then been crowned Emperor of the French and, on the 26th of May of the same year, was crowned King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Milan. Under French rule, Napoleon suppressed religious orders and launched public works in a city he intended as one of the capitals of his empire. A new wing was added to the Piazza San Marco, the Ala Napoleonica, planned as a royal residence. A new avenue, the Via Eugenia, was opened, named after Napoleon's stepson and viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais.

  The second period of French rule ended with Napoleon's defeat in the War of the Sixth Coalition. On the 20th of April 1814, Venice returned to Austrian rule. The region was incorporated into the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in 1815. Venice was alone among the major states destroyed by the French Revolution in not being restored after Napoleon's defeat.

  The shock of the fall shaped the literature that followed. Ugo Foscolo, a Venetian noble from the Ionian Islands, portrayed the trauma in his novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis in 1798. In 19th-century historiography, the source notes, the episode was largely avoided by both French and Italians as embarrassing: the French explained it away by emphasising the Republic's long decline, while Italian national historians saw the Venetian elites' cooperation as evidence of a lack of patriotism.

  On the 12th of May 1997, exactly two hundred years after the final vote, the separatist Lega Nord party staged an occupation of St Mark's Campanile. At Perasto, in present-day Montenegro, the last Venetian settlement to surrender had buried its banner beneath the main altar in a ceremony on the 23rd of August 1797. The garrison captain, Giuseppe Viscovich, gave a speech. That buried flag remained there long after the Austrian troops arrived in Zara to pealing bells and artillery salutes.