Abstract
From 1796 until the fall of Napoleon’s Empire in 1815 the public and private lives of many, perhaps most, Italians were filled with war, rumours of war and preparation for war. While they cannot be compared with twentieth-century experiences of ‘total war’, the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the security, economies, politics, lives and culture of Italians of all classes was considerable. However, measuring the impact of war is complicated. War was experienced more often indirectly than directly, affecting different social groups in different ways, while the consequences that are specific to war are not easily distinguished from the broader burdens imposed by the imperial project. Bearing these qualifications in mind, this chapter will begin by considering the human and material costs of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Italy. It will then explore the many different ways in which the experiences and memories of war weighed on Italian politics and political culture, from the closing years of Empire (1812–1815), including the Legitimist Restorations (1814–1815), to the liberal revolutions of 1820–1821 and their aftermath.1
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Notes
For recent studies on Napoleonic Italy, see Stuart J. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (London, 1991);
Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994);
Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, Napoleone (Rome, 2001);
Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke, 2005);
John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006);
and Renata De Lorenzo, Murat (Salerno, 2010).
On Risorgimento nationalism, see Alberto Mario Banti, La Nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unità (Turin, 2000);
and Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds), The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth Century Italy (Basingstoke, 2012).
There are as yet no Italian counterparts for the studies of Natalie Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire: Les soldats de Napoléon du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2003);
or Walter Bruyère-Ostells, La Grande Armée de la Liberté (Paris, 2009) on France.
See Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (Basingstoke, 2003);
and Piero Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento (Turin, 1962).
Pasquale Villani, L’Italia Napoleonica (Naples, 1978).
Alexander Grab, ‘Army, State, Society: Conscription and Deserters in Napoleonic Italy, 1802–14’, Journal of Modern History 67/1 (1995): 25–54; also Frederick C. Schneid, ‘The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz 2011–01-27. See, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/schneidf-2011-en URN: urn:nbn:de:0159–20101025334 (accessed 15 March 2015); and idem, Soldiers of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy: Army, State and Society 1800–1815 (Westport CT, 1995). On brigandage, see Davis, Naples and Napoleon, 209–231.
On Prina, see Marco Meriggi, Il Regno Lombardo-Veneto (Turin, 1987); on Naples, see Davis, Naples and Napoleon.
Pieri, Storia militare; John Rath, The fall of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, 1814 (New York, 1975); Meriggi, Il Regno; and Schneid, French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Grab, ‘Army, State, Society’; and also Grab, ‘Conscription and Desertion in France and Italy under Napoleon’, in Napoleonische Expansionspolitik: Okkupation oder Integration?, ed. Guido Braun et al. (Berlin, 2013), 102–119.
Pieri, Storia militare, 20; and Maria Casella (ed.), Armi e Nazione: Dalla Repubblica Cisalpina al Regno d’Italia, 1797–1814 (Milan, 2002).
Anna Maria Rao (ed.), Esercito e società nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica (Naples, 1990).
On Foscolo, see Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge, 1996), 412–416.
See Jean-Philippe Luis (ed.), La Guerre d’indépendance espagnole et le libéralisme au XIXe siècle (Madrid, 2011).
See Maurizio Isabella, The Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigrés and the Liberal International in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford, 2010);
and Giorgio Spini, Il mito della Spagna nel Risorgimento italiano (Rome, Perrella, 1954).
Roberto Bizzocchi, ‘Immagini della nazione nelle Famiglie Celebri di Pompeo Litta’, in Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento, ed. A. M. Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi (Rome, 2002), 60–73, 63.
See also Adrian Lyttelton, ‘The National Questions in Italy’, in The National Question in Europe in Historical Contest, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1993), 63–105;
Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past: History, Myth and Image in the Risorgimento’, in Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity Around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford, 2001), 27–76.
Alberto Asor Rosa, ‘L’epopea tragica di un popolo non guerriero’, in Guerra e Pace: Storia d’Italia. Annali 18, ed. Walter Barberis (Turin, 2002), 843–863, 848.
On censorship, see John A. Davis, ‘Italy’, in The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein (Westport, CT, 2000), 81–124;
and John A. Davis, ‘Italy’, Chapter 5 in The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theatre in Nineteenth-century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein (New York, 2009), 190–227.
Fernando Mazzocca, ‘L’iconografia della patria tra l’età del Regno e l’Unità’, in Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento, ed. A. M. Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi (Rome, 2002), 89–103, 89–100. That view was shared by the correspondent for Blackwood’s Magazine (Edinburgh, 1823), vol. 13, 27: ‘But Santa Croce, despite its beggarly front, is the real cynosure of travellers. What wretched tomb-builders we are in England! … The figures of any of Canova’s monuments might furnish forth marble sufficient to record and illustrate a million of our illustrious dead….’
On Risorgimento nationalism and Romanticism, see Banti, La Nazione del Risorgimento; Patriarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited; and Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, 2007).
Asor Rosa, ‘L’epopea tragica’, 843–856; and Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge, 2010), 23.
On Garibaldi, see Riall, Garibaldi; on the Italian soldiers in exile, see Gilles Pécout (ed.), ‘International Volunteers and the Risorgimento’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14/4 (2009): 413–490; and Isabella, The Risorgimento.
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Davis, J.A. (2016). The Costs of War: The Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Italian Postwar Politics. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_9
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