As a rule, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the educated, professional and secularized elites were more likely to regard Napoleon as a liberating force than the Catholic peasantry, who saw the French armies as foreign atheists:
Wishing to appear as an enlightened liberator, rather than just the latest in a long line of conquerors, Napoleon held out the hope of an eventually independent, unified nation-state and thereby kindled the sparks of Italian nationalism. To that end, the day after his arrival in Milan, he declared the creation of a Lombardic Republic. It would be governed by Italian pro-French giacobini (Jacobins, or ‘patriots’) and he encouraged political clubs to mushroom throughout the region (the one in Milan soon included eight hundred lawyers and merchants). He also abolished Austrian governing institutions, reformed Pavia University, held provisional municipal elections, founded a National Guard and conferred with the leading Milanese advocate of Italian unification, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, to whom he handed over as much power as possible.
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Lombardy was now a theoretically independent republic, albeit now a French protectorate, but the Veneto was still an Austrian province and Mantua was occupied by the Austrian army. Tuscany, Modena, Lucca and Parma were ruled by Austrian dukes and grand dukes; the Papal States (Bologna, Romagna, Ferrara, Umbria) were owned by the Pope; Naples and Sicily formed a single kingdom (the Two Sicilies) ruled by the Bourbon Ferdinand IV, and the Savoyard monarchy still reigned in Piedmont and Sardinia.
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Over the course of the next three years, known as the triennio, Italians saw the emergence of the giacobini in a series of ‘sister-republics’ that Napoleon was to set up. He wanted to establish a new Italian political culture based on the French Revolution that would prize meritocracy, nationhood and free-thinking over privilege, city-state localism and Tridentine Catholicism.
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Reforms that Napoleon imposed on the newly conquered territories included the abolition of internal tariffs, which helped to stimulate economic development, the ending of noble assemblies and other centres of feudal privilege, financial restructurings aimed at bringing down state debt, ending the restrictive guild system, imposing religious toleration, closing the ghettos and allowing Jews to live anywhere, and sometimes nationalizing Church property.
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As zealous leaders of what they truly considered to be a new form of civilization — although the actual word ‘civilization’ itself had only entered the French lexicon in the 1760s and was very little used in the Napoleonic era — the French revolutionary elites genuinely believed they were advancing the welfare of Europe under French leadership.
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‘All men of genius, everyone distinguished in the republic of letters, is French, whatever his nationality,’ Napoleon wrote from Milan in May 1796 to the eminent Italian astronomer Barnaba Oriani. ‘Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if … priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.’
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On May 23 a revolt against the French occupation in Pavia led by Catholic priests was put down harshly by Lannes, who simply shot the town council.
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‘As I was half way to Pavia, we met a thousand peasants at Binasco and defeated them,’ Napoleon reported to Berthier. ‘After killing one hundred of them we burned the village, setting a terrible but efficient example.’
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Napoleon believed that ‘bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine’, but he also thought that quick and certain punishments meant that large-scale repression could largely be avoided.
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‘If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’
During the Pavia revolt, which spread over much of Lombardy, five hundred hostages from some of the richest local families were taken to France as ‘state prisoners’ to ensure good behaviour. In the country around Tortona, Napoleon destroyed all the church bells that had been used to summon the revolt, and had no hesitation in shooting any village priest caught leading peasant bands.