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Revolution as Vendetta: Napoleonic Piedmont 1801–1814 II*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The virus of violent, personal vendetta had poisoned the blood of elite society in Piedmont by the time the country was formally annexed to France in April 1802. The turbulent events of the period 1794–1801 had inflamed and then politicized a society ‘whose customs steadfastly retained something of the unruly and fiercesome’, as Sauli d'Igliano, the son of a petty count from Ceva, chose to describe it when writing of his childhood in the mid-1790s. The revolutionary process unleashed and, finally, entrenched that penchant for violence among ‘men of the second order’ that Giuseppe Baretti had informed the whole of Europe of a generation earlier in his widely read An account of the manners and customs of Italy: ‘they are withal so punctilious and so ready to draw the sword, that more duels are fought in Piedmont than in the rest of Italy taken together’. The venom of revolution mingled with the poison of personal vendettas and brought their ferocity to the centre of political life. It was a virus the French would strive to stamp out, but one that would malinger in the subalpine body politic throughout their own rule and long after they had gone. As late as 1813, a substantial landowner of Bene, in southern Piedmont complained of his patriot maire's ‘despotisme et ses actes arbitraires…sans nombre’.
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References
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