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fpbNobody seems to have noticed the parallel; because, I suppose, not many historians today write from a Catholic viewpoint. But in 1798, two Catholic priests led two great popular insurrections on the two sides of the war then raging between a French Revolution not yet quite hijacked by a Corsican adventurer, and a reactionary Europe dedicated to the most contemptible and cynical forms of politics (the anti-French alliance was, at one and the same time, working together to slice and destroy Poland, and incidentally to destroy Kosciuzko's constitutional and liberal reforms). Their different fates had something to do with the different countries in which they took place, but they also had something to say about the future of the Catholic Church.
After Napoleon's triumphant campaign of 1796, which had not only delivered crushing victory over Austria but reorganized the whole of northern Italy into a group of pro-French republics, the states of central and southern Italy - Tuscany, the kingdom of the Pope, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies - were in an unstable and shaky situation. Catholic and conservative popular movements clashed with pro-French groupings. Within two years, the French - who had not originally intended to interfere with Florence, Rome and Naples - had been drawn into the whole of the peninsula, and their superior army simply smashed the forces of the King of the Two Sicilies (which included Sicily and the whole of southern Italy). The King fled to Sicily under the protection of the British fleet, and revolutionary party - which was only strong among the upper classes of the city of Naples - proclaimed yet another republic.
At the same time, rising discontent and French agitation had raised the political temperature in Ireland to the point where the English decided to occupy the island militarily, sending over large numbers of German mercenaries and "yeomanry" troops - a militia intended mainly for internal use. The British government seemed to have learned only one thing from the American and French revolution: suppress all discontent, always, brutally, before it ripens into revolt. They knew that their position in Ireland was both weak and illegitimate, and having only one weapon - mercenary foreign soldiers, paid by England's already enormous exchequer - they deployed it without stint. The result was that the Irish peasantry of County Wexford, led by a local priest, rose in arms, declaring that it was better to die fighting than to be murdered in their houses one after the other by yeomanry and mercenaries.
Meanwhile, in Palermo, another priest had been thinking of insurrection and war. Cardinal Ruffo di Calabria had been the King's Minister for Agriculture (Sicily was the only place in Europe which still kept the habit of medieval European kings to place ordained priests at the head of the bureaucracy), a competent and energetic administrator as well as a great landowner, and felt certain that the great kingdom's peasantry could be got to revolt in the name of the King and the Church. The King gave him pretty words and a piece of paper with a proclamation, and left him to land on the mainland practically alone, with a flag and a brevet.
In Ireland, after a few initial successes, Father Murphy's troops, receiving no help from the rest of the island, were surrounded and slaughtered by the enemy in a way that defies description. The horrors of that repression are known to every Irishman to this day, but I have no desire to rehearse them: let us just say that their like was not seen again in Europe until the Turkish massacres of eighty years later. And it was not the Turks, an Asian Muslim power from whom nobody expected humanity and mercy, who indulged in it, but the British of the Hannover age, the age whose image has been painted by Jane Austen.
I don't blame Jane Austen, who had no part and probably little knowledge of how her privileged class kept its position; but 1798 represents the historical low of English brutality and barbarity. Cardinal Ruffo, as I said, started his own war quite alone, certainly with no help from the English, even if the English knew of him at all; but within a few months, he had raised hordes of peasant rebels and really done what an Irish song dreams Father Murphy could have done - "swept all the land like a mighty wave". But the Cardinal was a humane and civilized man, and he was concerned about what his troops would do when they entered Naples victoriously. The taking of the city of Altamura had shown him that angry peasant waves could not easily be kept from slaughter; and so, instead of assaulting Naples, which lay helpless before him, he took the city's surrender on terms and promised safety to the rebels.
(It is worth pointing out, to indicate his quality as commander, that his horde of peasant rebels stopped before Naples and did nothing, because he told them to.)
At that point, Admiral Nelson, one of the worst brutes in that age of British brutes, sailed into the Bay of Naples, and, never having shot a bullet in anger against the Neapolitan rebels, countermanded the Cardinal's orders and decreed their massacre - ultimately on the authority of the King of Sicily (who, we will remember, had done nothing to help his own loyal minister Ruffo, except give him a piece of paper making him commander of an army that did not exist and that Ruffo brought into being himself). Nelson liked the butchery of civilians: when the Turkish pasha Ali of Janina had ordered the massacre of every person in a surrendered French garrison in the Ionian - including women and children - till his own executioners were so exhausted they no longer could work, Nelson had sent him a message of congratulations. This is the figure of which English propaganda has made a chivalrous hero of the war of the seas. (Sixteen years later, incidentally, Lord Cochrane, who was not only an infinitely finer person but a better naval commander, and who was regarded by the French as their worst enemy on the seas, was coolly and deliberately ruined by a conspiracy of upper-class politicians because he was too upright and liberal for their taste. Nelson is repulsively remembered to this day; Cochrane remains unknown. It is an English instinct to reward the unworthy and punish heroes.)
Cardinal Ruffo had served his king all his life, as administrator, minister and clergyman; he had risked his life for him, fought a victorious war starting from nothing, and given him back his kingdom. At this appalling outrage against his dignity as commander and his decency as a Christian man, he left - at fifty-five years of age! - and went straight over to France, and never came back. Even after the fall of Napoleon, he did not return to Naples, but made his house in Rome, the Pope's capital (together, curiously enough, with a number of other Napoleonic holdovers such as Cardinal Fesch, the emperor's uncle and minister for religious affairs). And that was the end of the most impressive, honourable and courageous adventure taken in the name of resisting the Revolution.
It was not the only case. Andreas Hofer, an inn-keeper from Tyrol, broke down the age-old enmity between Germans ("crucchi") and Italians ("waelsche") in the name of common opposition to Napoleon and common loyalty to the House of Habsburg; he gave the French Hell for years and made Tyrol a no-go area for them; his reward was to be abandoned to the vengeance of Napoleon once the Habsburg minister Metternich determined (wrongly, as usual) that there was more to be gained in being Napoleon's abject supporter than his enemy. Count Joseph de Maistre, from Savoy, stranded as ambassador to St.Petersburg as his master (the lord of Savoy and Piedmont, styled King of Sardinia) was driven from his ancestral lands into Sardinia, kept up the style and rank of ambassador for twenty years, with no money or support from his king, maintaining Russian recognition of and interest in Sardinian affairs by the sheer force of his brilliant personality, and at the same time wrote a series of books that were the strongest argument against the French Revolution that anyone had yet made; once his King had been restored to his territories, Count de Maistre was practically the only loyalist who was not restored and rewarded, and he died poor though not obscure - his reward for having been by far the most effective and loyal of his men. Cruelty, brutality and ingratitude seemed to be a feature of the anti-French alliance.
As for the British, the tale of their brutality and barbarity is by no means exhausted in Ireland and Italy. At the same time as they were murdering Irish and Italian rebels, they were breaking the Muslim powers of southern India in ways that the British Empire preferred, afterwards, not to recall, and attended by episodes of looting so fantastic and savage that every English returnee from India was expected to be both rich and a scoundrel.
But where Europe is concerned, the contemporaneous time and nature of the revolts of Father Murphy and Cardinal Ruffo - to which one should probably add that of Kosciuzko in Poland and Belarus - are not a coincidence. They show, for a start, that the Church had no friends on either side of the revolutionary wars. If the British were still dreaming of the final suppression of Catholicism, the Russian Empire intended to reduce it to a state religion (and actually set up a Catholic Archiocese, that of Mohilev, without the approval of the Pope) and the Austrians to make it a ministry of the state. The Austrians betrayed Hofer because his Catholic revolt was too popular for their tastes; they preferred to make disreputable deals with the tyrant Napoleon without any popular movements intruding in the deal-making between absolute sovereigns. Revolution and Reaction were at one in this, the desire to destroy the autonomy and the popular nature of the Church.
After Napoleon's triumphant campaign of 1796, which had not only delivered crushing victory over Austria but reorganized the whole of northern Italy into a group of pro-French republics, the states of central and southern Italy - Tuscany, the kingdom of the Pope, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies - were in an unstable and shaky situation. Catholic and conservative popular movements clashed with pro-French groupings. Within two years, the French - who had not originally intended to interfere with Florence, Rome and Naples - had been drawn into the whole of the peninsula, and their superior army simply smashed the forces of the King of the Two Sicilies (which included Sicily and the whole of southern Italy). The King fled to Sicily under the protection of the British fleet, and revolutionary party - which was only strong among the upper classes of the city of Naples - proclaimed yet another republic.
At the same time, rising discontent and French agitation had raised the political temperature in Ireland to the point where the English decided to occupy the island militarily, sending over large numbers of German mercenaries and "yeomanry" troops - a militia intended mainly for internal use. The British government seemed to have learned only one thing from the American and French revolution: suppress all discontent, always, brutally, before it ripens into revolt. They knew that their position in Ireland was both weak and illegitimate, and having only one weapon - mercenary foreign soldiers, paid by England's already enormous exchequer - they deployed it without stint. The result was that the Irish peasantry of County Wexford, led by a local priest, rose in arms, declaring that it was better to die fighting than to be murdered in their houses one after the other by yeomanry and mercenaries.
Meanwhile, in Palermo, another priest had been thinking of insurrection and war. Cardinal Ruffo di Calabria had been the King's Minister for Agriculture (Sicily was the only place in Europe which still kept the habit of medieval European kings to place ordained priests at the head of the bureaucracy), a competent and energetic administrator as well as a great landowner, and felt certain that the great kingdom's peasantry could be got to revolt in the name of the King and the Church. The King gave him pretty words and a piece of paper with a proclamation, and left him to land on the mainland practically alone, with a flag and a brevet.
In Ireland, after a few initial successes, Father Murphy's troops, receiving no help from the rest of the island, were surrounded and slaughtered by the enemy in a way that defies description. The horrors of that repression are known to every Irishman to this day, but I have no desire to rehearse them: let us just say that their like was not seen again in Europe until the Turkish massacres of eighty years later. And it was not the Turks, an Asian Muslim power from whom nobody expected humanity and mercy, who indulged in it, but the British of the Hannover age, the age whose image has been painted by Jane Austen.
I don't blame Jane Austen, who had no part and probably little knowledge of how her privileged class kept its position; but 1798 represents the historical low of English brutality and barbarity. Cardinal Ruffo, as I said, started his own war quite alone, certainly with no help from the English, even if the English knew of him at all; but within a few months, he had raised hordes of peasant rebels and really done what an Irish song dreams Father Murphy could have done - "swept all the land like a mighty wave". But the Cardinal was a humane and civilized man, and he was concerned about what his troops would do when they entered Naples victoriously. The taking of the city of Altamura had shown him that angry peasant waves could not easily be kept from slaughter; and so, instead of assaulting Naples, which lay helpless before him, he took the city's surrender on terms and promised safety to the rebels.
(It is worth pointing out, to indicate his quality as commander, that his horde of peasant rebels stopped before Naples and did nothing, because he told them to.)
At that point, Admiral Nelson, one of the worst brutes in that age of British brutes, sailed into the Bay of Naples, and, never having shot a bullet in anger against the Neapolitan rebels, countermanded the Cardinal's orders and decreed their massacre - ultimately on the authority of the King of Sicily (who, we will remember, had done nothing to help his own loyal minister Ruffo, except give him a piece of paper making him commander of an army that did not exist and that Ruffo brought into being himself). Nelson liked the butchery of civilians: when the Turkish pasha Ali of Janina had ordered the massacre of every person in a surrendered French garrison in the Ionian - including women and children - till his own executioners were so exhausted they no longer could work, Nelson had sent him a message of congratulations. This is the figure of which English propaganda has made a chivalrous hero of the war of the seas. (Sixteen years later, incidentally, Lord Cochrane, who was not only an infinitely finer person but a better naval commander, and who was regarded by the French as their worst enemy on the seas, was coolly and deliberately ruined by a conspiracy of upper-class politicians because he was too upright and liberal for their taste. Nelson is repulsively remembered to this day; Cochrane remains unknown. It is an English instinct to reward the unworthy and punish heroes.)
Cardinal Ruffo had served his king all his life, as administrator, minister and clergyman; he had risked his life for him, fought a victorious war starting from nothing, and given him back his kingdom. At this appalling outrage against his dignity as commander and his decency as a Christian man, he left - at fifty-five years of age! - and went straight over to France, and never came back. Even after the fall of Napoleon, he did not return to Naples, but made his house in Rome, the Pope's capital (together, curiously enough, with a number of other Napoleonic holdovers such as Cardinal Fesch, the emperor's uncle and minister for religious affairs). And that was the end of the most impressive, honourable and courageous adventure taken in the name of resisting the Revolution.
It was not the only case. Andreas Hofer, an inn-keeper from Tyrol, broke down the age-old enmity between Germans ("crucchi") and Italians ("waelsche") in the name of common opposition to Napoleon and common loyalty to the House of Habsburg; he gave the French Hell for years and made Tyrol a no-go area for them; his reward was to be abandoned to the vengeance of Napoleon once the Habsburg minister Metternich determined (wrongly, as usual) that there was more to be gained in being Napoleon's abject supporter than his enemy. Count Joseph de Maistre, from Savoy, stranded as ambassador to St.Petersburg as his master (the lord of Savoy and Piedmont, styled King of Sardinia) was driven from his ancestral lands into Sardinia, kept up the style and rank of ambassador for twenty years, with no money or support from his king, maintaining Russian recognition of and interest in Sardinian affairs by the sheer force of his brilliant personality, and at the same time wrote a series of books that were the strongest argument against the French Revolution that anyone had yet made; once his King had been restored to his territories, Count de Maistre was practically the only loyalist who was not restored and rewarded, and he died poor though not obscure - his reward for having been by far the most effective and loyal of his men. Cruelty, brutality and ingratitude seemed to be a feature of the anti-French alliance.
As for the British, the tale of their brutality and barbarity is by no means exhausted in Ireland and Italy. At the same time as they were murdering Irish and Italian rebels, they were breaking the Muslim powers of southern India in ways that the British Empire preferred, afterwards, not to recall, and attended by episodes of looting so fantastic and savage that every English returnee from India was expected to be both rich and a scoundrel.
But where Europe is concerned, the contemporaneous time and nature of the revolts of Father Murphy and Cardinal Ruffo - to which one should probably add that of Kosciuzko in Poland and Belarus - are not a coincidence. They show, for a start, that the Church had no friends on either side of the revolutionary wars. If the British were still dreaming of the final suppression of Catholicism, the Russian Empire intended to reduce it to a state religion (and actually set up a Catholic Archiocese, that of Mohilev, without the approval of the Pope) and the Austrians to make it a ministry of the state. The Austrians betrayed Hofer because his Catholic revolt was too popular for their tastes; they preferred to make disreputable deals with the tyrant Napoleon without any popular movements intruding in the deal-making between absolute sovereigns. Revolution and Reaction were at one in this, the desire to destroy the autonomy and the popular nature of the Church.
