The Bourbons (1)
In the early 1700s the
Kingdom of Naples came out of the War of the
Spanish Succession in the hands of the
Hapsburgs, the royal house of Austria. Then,
the Austrians were driven from Naples by a
young prince from the Spanish branch of the
House of Bourbon, to be known upon his
accession to the throne of Naples in 1734 as Charles III.
(The statue, left, is at Piazza Plebiscito.)
Naples was an independent kingdom again for
the first time in two hundred years. After
twenty-five years of rule, Charles would
abdicate and return to Spain. They say that
before he left he was careful to return the
crown jewels. He even gave back a ring which
he, himself, had found while digging around
Pompeii, saying, "Even this ring belongs to
the state". This story, true or not, shows the
regard, even veneration, that has attached
itself to this first Bourbon king of Naples.
He was paradoxically sad yet energetic,
outgoing but melancholy, and he is almost
unanimously regarded as an example of the
"enlightened monarch".
Charles left impressive accomplishments: he
restored some order to public finance,
curtailed church privilege, and built many now
familiar, spectacular architectural features,
such as the royal palaces at Capodimonte, Portici and Caserta. He also
started the National
Library, the Archaeological
Museum, a National
Academy of Art and the excavations at
Pompeii and Herculaneum.
By the middle of the century, Naples was a
capital of Enlightenment Europe, and Antonio Genovesi,
lecturing at the University, could freely
speak of redistribution of property and
agrarian reform. Also, Naples developed into a
music capital of Europe, much of it performed
in the most splendid theater of its day, San Carlo.
Most of all, perhaps, Charles encouraged the
growth of a new commercial middle-class and
sought to move his subjects out of the
lingering middle ages of anachronistic class
privilege and baronial abuse. Well-meaning or
not, however, he was not entirely successful
in confronting this age-old problem, which is
evidence of the powerful inertia of centuries
of feudalism and of the overwhelming forces of
reaction arrayed against him. In 1759 Charles
returned to Spain to succeed his father on the
Spanish throne. He left Naples in the hands of
his eight-year old son and a regent.
His son Ferdinand ruled until 1825. It was to
be a dynamic period: the Industrial
Revolution, the social and political theories
of Rousseau and the music of Ludwig van
Beethoven. Primarily, it was the French
Revolution, Napoleon, and armies ranging over
Europe on an unprecedented scale. If, from the
late 20th century, we look back at, say, the
1750's and view as 'quaint' a scene of fat
bewigged monarchs bouncing on horseback
through the woods, by 1825 the scene would
change: a young Darwin would be wondering what
made the world go round and Karl Marx would
already be seven years old. It would be many
things, but not 'quaint'.
Back to 1759. Ferdinand (the
statue, left, is at Piazza Plebiscito) was
uniquely unfit to run a kingdom. He was a
good-natured knucklehead who spoke only the
local dialect, loved to roughhouse and bandy
jokes with his servants and, indeed, felt so
at home among them that he was called the lazzarone king,
that term (from St. Lazarus, the patron saint
of lepers) being the term for any of the
unwashed teeming masses. He hated to read, but
was very big on the other two Rs—riding and
relaxing. Fortunately, Charles III had left
the Foreign Secretary in charge, one marquis Bernardo Tanucci, a
capable and intelligent manager. Even after
the child-king came of age in 1767, Tanucci
ran the government down to the minutest
detail. He was basically concerned with
conserving the cultural and economic
institutions that Charles had left in place,
and he did as good a job as possible in the
face of a baronial and ecclesiastical
opposition determined to preserve its
privileges.
In 1768 Ferdinand married the Archduchess Maria
Carolina of Austria (painting, below)
the sister of the Emperor and the younger
sister of Marie Antoinette. She was
intelligent, headstrong and utterly convinced
that she had been born to rule. She had a seat
on the ruling council of Naples and set about
to make Naples into what a royal court should
be, another Vienna or Paris. She owned and
treated the king like the fun-loving sheepdog
he was and during the 1770s and 1780s made
Naples into less of a marketplace of
Enlightenment thought and more of a showcase
of royal glitter with cultural institutions
nevertheless still worthy enough to attract
Mozart and Goethe.
The queen forced Tanucci to
resign, and she acquired the services of John Acton, an
ex-patriate Englishman who had been commander
of the naval forces of Tuscany. In the decade
before the French Revolution, Acton remade the
Neapolitan royal navy into one of the finest
fleets in the Mediterranean. He opened arms
and ironworks factories, built bridges and
roads and founded the Royal Military Academy.
By the time of the Revolution (1789), he, as
much as the queen, was in charge of the
Kingdom of Naples. The king was usually out
hunting.
When the French Revolution started, Acton and
the Queen were concerned with keeping the
kingdom safe from infection by revolutionary
French ideas. Interestingly, the masses in
Naples—those who might have stood the most to
gain from storming a Bastille or two—did not
seem to be interested in throwing off
their yoke. Intellectuals debated the virtues
of revolution and radical social reform, but
the people, themselves, generally liked their
king and disliked anything French, even
progress.
By 1793, however, the French King Louis XVI
had been beheaded, the Austrians and French
were at war, and battles were flaring up in
northern Italy as revolutionary fervor took
hold. Naples agreed with the rest of European
royal opinion that the revolution had to be
stemmed, and in the summer of 1793 troops from
the kingdom joined the Spanish and British at
the port of Toulon, recently taken by the
British, to keep it from being recaptured by
forces of the French Republic. They failed,
and in so doing gained the dubious distinction
of providing a young artillery officer from
Corsica with his first victory—and a promotion
from lieutenant to Brigadier General. By 1797,
Napoleon had swept through northern Italy, and
in 1798 the French invaded the Vatican States
to set up the Roman Republic. Through their
looting and violent antireligious behavior
(including the imprisonment of the Pope), they
alienated the Roman populace completely.
Naples then sent troops to drive the French
from Rome. They were unsuccessful and the
French counterattacked into the kingdom. With
French troops at the door and the now very
real threat of Republican insurrection from
within the city of Naples, the King and Queen
fled to Sicily on Christmas of 1798.
Naples fell after bitter fighting between
Republican French troops and their Neapolitan
sympathizers on one side and the ever loyal
poor lazzaroni
on the other, dedicated to their king
right to the end. With the French victory, the
Parthenopean Republic was declared. Although
some have termed it a 'revolution', there is
little doubt that the Republic was imposed by
force from without. The French also imposed
war 'reparations' on the new Republic,
thus further antagonizing the people.
The Republic was destined to last a mere five
months. The King and Queen may have fled to
Sicily, but they were not idle.
King Ferdinand set about retaking his kingdom.
He found Cardinal Ruffo,
a warrior zealot who landed on the Calabrian
mainland with nothing but a flag and his own
forceful personality. Ruffo raised an army
from among the tough peasantry in the
surrounding countryside as he marched north.
Depending on who is telling the story, Ruffo's
Christian Army of the Holy Faith, the sanfedisti,
were either ruthless fanatics or they were a
collection of Robin Hoods (such as the famous
bandit, Fra Diavolo)
loyal to their king, on a mission to drive out
foreign invaders. In fairness to Ruffo, he
tried to curb the excesses of his troops, and
if they were violent, it is equally true that
their opponents, those who were dispensing
Republican libertè,
fraternitè et ègalitè
in the ex-kingdom of Naples at the moment,
were equally passionate. Suffice it to say
that there was barbarism on both sides as
Ruffo swept north, up through Calabria and
Puglia, into Campania and towards the capital.
The tide was now turning swiftly against the
French Republic in Europe. Combined forces of
the monarchies in Britain, Russia and Austria
were taking advantage of the absence of
Napoleon. He was off in Egypt during most of
1799 attempting, and ultimately failing, to
destroy British influence in the
Mediterranean. During that time, virtually all
of the Republic's advances in northern Italy,
which he had brilliantly forged two years
earlier, were reversed. For Naples, the time
could not have been better for a royalist
reconquest. The French pulled the main body of
their army north and left a token force in the
city. With British allies under Admiral Nelson
blockading the port of Naples, Ruffo and his
army entered the city. They offered the
defenders free passage if they surrendered.
They did, but Nelson, certainly at the behest
of the royal family, still in Sicily, and over
the strenuous objections of Ruffo, who had
given his Christian word, had a number of the
Republican defenders put to death, including
the Republican Admiral, Caracciolo, who was
hanged from the yardarm. The subsequent mass
trials and executions of supporters of the
Republic are infamous. (Read about one victim,
Eleonora Fonseca
Pimentel.)
Royalist Neapolitan forces had taken advantage
of a general French collapse in Northern Italy
and, indeed, the collapse of the French
Republic, itself. For a moment in late 1799,
after a decade of incredible turbulence, the
monarchies of Europe saw 'the light at the end
of the tunnel'. It was a brief respite,
however, for Bonaparte was back in Paris and
on November 9, 1799, he overthrew the French
Directory and became First Consul. It was
notice to the princes and kings of the
continent not to get too comfortable in the
imperial mantle of Charlemagne.
[continued at Bourbons
(2).]
to portal index for
history
to main index
