Introduction
Castell’Arquato, in the foothills of the Apennines, is today a cherished tourist destination. Exquisite steep streets dotted with fine art galleries and charming restaurants lead to a medieval piazza which overlooks the picturesque valley of the river Tolla. The Romanesque Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta (first built in 756 on the site of the original castrum) and a civic hospital dating from the fourteenth century attest to the town’s long history. By1805, Castell’Arquato was an important commune of nearly 3,000 inhabitants with jurisdiction over several smaller villages (Molossi 1833–Reference Molossi1834, 70–76). Proud of its freedoms, Castell’Arquato had successfully resisted the encroachments of generations of feudal lords who controlled the territory around the bishopric seat of Piacenza. In the fifteenth century, the dukes of Milan granted the town administrative privileges, recognised by the Farnese who ruled from 1545 and left in place by the Bourbon dukes who took over in 1748. Municipal offices included an anzianato (council of elders, a permanent executive board composed of the most notable citizens), a comessario tasked with routine law and order matters and a podestà (mayor). The commune also employed a squad of sbirri (watchmen performing policing duties) but criminal justice cases and any matter above the commissioner’s competence were deferred to the court in Piacenza, which also paid part of the local officials’ salaries (Nasalli Rocca Reference Nasalli Rocca1983, 146–149; Di Noto Reference Di Noto1980, 145–147, 333). Castell’Arquato was, therefore, quite accustomed to running its own affairs without much external interference; this did not change under Napoleonic domination. The minutes of the anzianato’s monthly meetings for the period 1800–1805 bring to life an active community, focused on local matters such as repairing roads, devising building codes and raising funds for its hospital. No particular animosity towards the French administration surfaces from these notes, save for irritation over the onerous task of collecting increasingly higher taxes. Yet, in January 1806, with insurrection raging across the Val di Tolla, French communiqués named Castell’Arquato a rebel town, marked for expeditious punishment. The commune managed to escape the French ire unscathed: its leaders literally talked their way out of the impending retribution. While doing so, they formulated a discursive strategy that opens a window onto the complex asymmetric relationship between Napoleonic administrators and their reluctant, even when not rebellious, administrés.Beyond displays of uncompromising force, Napoleonic executives in Italy sought to strike a balance between repression and benevolence, with the ultimate goal of reshaping Italian society along modern – that is, French – norms. Achieving agreed-upon narratives to describe contentious local events was a crucial first step, dependent on Italians’ grasping of the give-and-take inherent within the language of law and order. Castell’Arquato was able to play David to the French Empire’s Goliath by cleverly discerning and then putting into words the tacit accommodations that underpinned French rule.
A quiet town
Unlike other regions in northern Italy, the States of Parma, formerly the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, enjoyed a limited degree of autonomy due to diplomatic considerations related to Spain’s neutrality.Footnote 1 Consequently, communities like Castell’Arquato were able to maintain their administrative structure unchanged. In addition to the anzianati in large and mid-size towns, this arrangement also left in place the all-volunteer militia organised in ten terzi, each headed by a colonel (Ghisalberti Reference Ghisalberti1981, 431–454; Broers Reference Broers2003, 203–211).Footnote 2 Taking swift advantage of the sudden death of Ferdinand, the last Bourbon duke, in 1802, Napoleon nominated Moreau de Saint-Méry as administrator general with the powers – but not the title – of prefect. A native of Martinique known for his encyclopaedic studies on the Caribbean, a pro-slavery advocate and enthusiastic revolutionary at the same time, Moreau was used to walking a fine line, which helped him deal with Parma’s ambiguities – at least at the beginning of his administration.Footnote 3 He tried to avoid hurting local sensibilities by creating administrative units that duplicated and supervised most local institutions without abolishing them. This may explain why no public protests addressed crucial policies that turned the States of Parma into a department in all but name, starting with the introduction of the Civil Code in May1805. Later that summer a company of gendarmerie, recruited and deployed in the same way as those in the interior of the Empire, was stationed in the capital; immediately afterwards, the states were incorporated within the 28th Military Division headquartered in Genoa. These were haphazard changes, seeing that Napoleon was monitoring the international situation before deciding the territories’ definitive status. In the interim, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s immediate supervisor was the governor of Liguria and arch-treasurer of the Empire, Charles-François Lebrun. Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy as of Napoleon’s coronation on 26 May 1805, oversaw Parma’s military obligations, consisting mostly of behind-the-front duties such as operating hospitals and supplies facilities.
The gradual slide from autonomy to de facto French rule barely touched the daily lives of rural communities like Castell’Arquato. The most tangible signs of change took the form of overbearing, though not immediately life-altering, taxation, which resulted in a great deal of grumbling and foot-dragging, rather than open revolt.Footnote 4 This relative calm changed abruptly in December 1805, when a popular uprising brought the States of Parma to the attention of imperial authorities.
By the Decree of 5 Frimaire an 14 (25 November 1805), Viceroy Eugène decided to establish a reserve camp between Bologna and Modena. Even though the territory was not formally part of the kingdom, recruiting volunteers in the States of Parma was within Eugène’s authority. He sent Moreau de Saint-Méry a request for 12,000 men to be selected from the militia units serving in each commune, a task the administrator general delegated to militia colonels. Things went well in the beginning and the chance to serve in Prince Eugène’s army did persuade about 700 officers and NCOs who rushed to sign up. The vast majority of likely recruits balked at the prospect, reflecting negative reactions to the military draft everywhere.Footnote 5 In this case, the revulsion preceded the actual levy, tentatively scheduled for 1806: joining the reserve camps was supposed to be on a voluntary basis only. Rumours that not only unmarried youngsters but also heads of households were pressured to enrol consolidated suspicions that volunteer service was a smokescreen for regular conscription, and by mid-December rebellion engulfed the entire Val di Tolla, with Castell’Arquato playing a prominent part (Paltrineri Reference Paltrinieri1927; Broers Reference Broers2005, 80–93).Footnote 6
The meaning of rebellion
Moreau de Saint-Méry wrote the first report on the insurrection on 29 December 1805. It was addressed to Governor Lebrun, who shared the news with General Montchoisy, commander of the 28th military division, and with Viceroy Eugène.Footnote 7 Moreau singled out Castell’Arquato as a main centre for revolt. According to his diaries, Castell’Arquato had distinguished itself as the first commune where the gendarmes intervened: the entry for 1 January 1806 mentioned a message from Captain Lanault stating that he had occupied the village and killed 15 rebels (Faidherbe Reference Faidherbe1983, 5). Another report singled out the town as an early supplier of weapons to the insurgents, information that ended up in Minister of Police Joseph Fouché’s bulletin of 11 January: ‘On 29 Dec, the insurgents bought ammunition in Castell’Arquato and went to Lugagnano, where they ordered the chief of the sbirri to take to Vigoleno provisions for 600 men’ (D’Hauterive Reference D’Hauterive1913, 222). Piacenza’s military commander General Marion listed Castell’Arquato together with the nearby commune of Lugagnano as a hotbed of unrest in his letters to Pietro Albesani, Piacenza’s recently nominated imperial prosecutor, who was gathering evidence for daily informative notes to Governor Lebrun and to the minister of justice.Footnote 8 Pietro Cavagnari, a prominent local businessman, also mentioned the commune in his communications with the authorities (Cavagnari Reference Cavagnari1837, 83–86). All evidence pointed in the same direction and it made sense that Lebrun cited Castell’Arquato in his first public statement to the rebels, posted on 7 January 1806:
In the name of His Majesty Emperor and King, the Arch-treasurer of the Empire
To the inhabitants of Salso Maggiore, Vigoleno, Lugagnano and Castel d’Arquato
From the distant Germany and in the middle of his victories His Majesty thinks of your happiness and orders me to set up for you the benefits of a new organisation; and I hear that out of your homes come cries of sedition and I am told you have taken up arms. What are you asking for? What is the reason for your uprising?
By the time they asked this rhetorical question, French officials had already made up their minds as to the root cause: as soon as the news reached them, they described the Piacentino uprising as a criminal enterprise instigated and led by brigands. Routine criminalisation of popular revolts stood at the core of the general strategy of delegitimising any challenges to the French-imposed order. The work of Michael Broers, Howard Brown, John A. Davis, Alexander Grab, Charles Esdaile, Alan Forrest, Anna Maria Rao and others has demonstrated that equating rebellion in occupied lands with brigandage was a strategy meant to delegitimise the motives of such actions and pre-empt challenges to French authority. This was not in itself a novelty (Nicolas, Reference Nicolas2002). More innovative was the insertion of the language of brigandage in legal statutes that made legitimate rebellion a legal impossibility and justified brutal repression in terms of crime control and prevention.Footnote 9 Working within this template, Governor Lebrun and Viceroy Eugène prepared a muscled military intervention. But they also decided to make some allowances for exasperation with improper enlisting, provided insurgents recognised that armed revolt, even against acceptable grievances, was a crime. Remarkably, this small concession was decided even though Prosecutor Albesani argued that complaints against recruitment were too opportunistic to be taken seriously and concealed a deeper, potentially more alarming opposition to French rule in general:
One hears that this insurrection happened as a result of recruitment of soldiers for the National Guard that was ordered here to send them to Bologna. In addition, there are rumours that England’s agents have profited from the discontent to push them to revolt. Everything is possible but what is sure is that long before and even from the first days the gendarmerie appeared in this region they [the peasants] rebelled against it and have killed some gendarmes; in a word, the public mood has been the same so that forced conscription could not do anything but embolden them to put into practice the evil projects they had been concocting for a long time.Footnote 10
Albesani made clear that the revolt was not a sudden explosion of rage but the result of widespread discontent. He also dismissed the explanation of brigandage: in other reports he referred to the lack of proper policing (a sorry situation he intended to remedy in his capacity as chief magistrate in Piacenza) but only as an enabling factor; if the insurrection was a crime, it was rooted in public opposition to the new order of things, not in specific activities. Albesani was a conscientious magistrate who based his opinion on accounts solicited from mayors and justices of peace who reported to him. Governor Lebrun and Viceroy Eugène chose to set aside his analysis and reverted to Empire-wide strategies of pacification centered on brigandage, only slightly adapted to local events. Rough recruitment in National Guard units could be laid at the feet of over-eager militia officers who – supposedly – misapplied French orders and thus opened a window of opportunity for ever-present nefarious brigands to do their evil deeds. Accordingly, in all public documents the French employed the trope of misled country folk to whom the French magnanimously offered the opportunity to mend their ways – or else: ‘Impostors push you to wrongdoing; brigands want to associate you with their crimes in order to escape the reprisals of the law’ read Lebrun’s address of 7 January 1806.Footnote 11 In the same tone, Viceroy Eugène’s message, posted in Parma by his aide-de-camp De La Croix, called on rebels to return to their homes while there was still time:
Think carefully. The French soldiers, generous with the enemies of their country, never concede to pardon rebellions. If in two hours from the present proclamation you do not disband, I have the sorrow to tell you that your families will have to shed tears for many years on account of your disobedience and of your crime.Footnote 12
The paternalistic language hardly obscured the unambiguous threats; at the same time, local leaders could read between the lines and distinguish an escape route: embracing the narrative of a fundamentally innocent population too weak to fend off criminal intrusion.
Repression
In Castell’Arquato, the town commissioners, the parish priest and the podestà Francesco Gerra dissected the news with a great deal of concern. As soon as Lebrun’s address reached them, they embarked on a protracted process of insistent pleading meant to impress on the French their commune’s unblemished record of obedience and deference to state authority. This was not an easy task, considering the abundant evidence of anti-French activity in Castell’Arquato. Besides, the town officials must have been aware of what Albesani called the mauvais esprit public, the defiant public attitude in the entire area. Were there any inquiries into the constituents’ state of mind? Was the citizenry divided? Local archives are mute on this issue: no minutes of the anzianato’s sessions over the months of the rebellion have been preserved. Maybe the anziani did not meet formally or maybe municipal officials took care to destroy compromising records. The only documented trace of clear discontent goes back to November 1805 when the anziani took the rather risky step of refusing to honour a financial request for 895.19 lire, sent by the administrator general after the commune had already paid its annual contribution.Footnote 13
The state archives in Parma contain only two documents written by the rebels themselves. Corroborating the gendarmes’ reports, they show that, at the very least, there was communication between the rebel camps and the municipality of Castell’Arquato, although they shed scant light on the nature of the connection. The first is a request for provisions written in halting, uncertain language, but in a decidedly self-important tone:
In the name of all the Army
Lugagnano 3 January 1806
To the commissioner of Castell’Arquato. In his absence, to the community leaders of that place.
As soon as this letter is received you will prepare provisions for more than four thousand men, half to be ready by noon, the rest afterwards, all under your responsibility.
In the name of the above Army
P.S. The several troops in Castell’Arquato will be orderly. All [inhabitants] will be respected. [We are] confident to find the same good faith; otherwise, the troops will be ordered to ravage the place and not leave stone upon stone.Footnote 14
This is a rather ambiguous document: if indeed Castell’Arquato was one of the first sites of rebellion and a willing supplier for insurgents, the menacing tone seems out of place. Maybe after two weeks of mayhem the citizenry was having second thoughts and decided to give co-operation a try? If so, the mayor had the backing of his commune in his efforts to appease the French. The other note from insurgents, scribbled on a piece of paper dated ‘From the Headquarters of Val di Tolla 7 January 1806’ (which could have meant either Castell’Arquato or Lugagnano) marked ‘subito’, arrived by courier:
Your lordship will be so kind to gather his troops and lead them to the Vernasco Camp... we took four cannons and other ammunition and we have also killed many French soldiers. We are waiting for the captain of Pellegrino and that of Pianino and also Giordano, Captain of Pezzata.Footnote 15
In four days, the upbeat exuberance of 3 January mutated into the urgency of a last desperate move, and no wonder: by the end of the first week of January 1806 about 5,000 soldiers had poured into the valleys of the Apennines, especially in the Val di Tolla, and their numbers grew to 10,000 by the end of the second week. The repression was organised much according to counter-insurgency tactics tested as far back as the Vendée insurrections: a mix of rapidly acting colonnes mobiles, reinforced with units of gendarmeries fanning out in the territory, with help from local militia.Footnote 16 Together, they made short work of ill-equipped rebels who, when not brandishing pitchforks and knives, carried the old muskets that militia members kept in their homes (‘shabby contraptions that for more than a century have never done any damage’ as Lieutenant Vivian described them to MoreauFootnote 17 ). At the end of the second week of January, military commanders reported confidently that the rebellion had been subdued. Insurgents in Castell’Arquato – whether residents or intruders – had surrendered even earlier, according to Albesani’s report to the Minister of Justice, dated 10 January 1805:
I hasten to inform Y.E. that the mountain rebels have returned to order and left the advantageous positions they had occupied: Rivargaro, Agazzano, Borgonovo, Ponte Albassola and Castell’Arquato. They gave back to the troops the cannon and other ammunitions (…) In a word, all is quiet.Footnote 18
The insurgents’ boast that they had killed so many Frenchmen would appear to have been quite simply boasting: the French did not report any deaths, only a few wounded. The insurrection crushed, the French prepared to move to the second phase: the creation of military commissions to identify and judge the instigators of the rebellion.
From guilt to innocence
Castell’Arquato’s podestà and his associates did not wait to see whether or not some of their villagers would end up before the Military Commission: being named in Governor Lebrun’s published address put their entire population at risk. Consequently, the municipality approached the French authorities with tearful requests for deletion from the ill-omened list, along with a pledge of submission:
It caused this municipality much pain to learn that His Most Serene Highness the arch-treasurer had included Castell’Arquato among the insurgent communes in his published manifest of pardon. Yet, this community begs fervently Your Excellency to remove from us this mark of ignominy hoping we have given many strong signs of unalterable submission.Footnote 19
Next day, 12 January, Gerra sent a desperate note to Moreau de Saint-Méry, complaining that Lieutenant Colonel Illica, the local militia officer now acting on behalf of the French army, who had arrived in town moments after the commune sent the previous day’s letter of submission, had heaped abuse on the inhabitants and ordered a requisition of fodder for his troops’ horses. Worse, they were notified that they should expect a contingent of 30 men to be housed and fed by the commune, an impossible effort surely meant as punishment.Footnote 20 But the inhabitants, loyal and dutiful subjects, should not be punished, wrote the town’s officials – in French this time, in a second letter sent the same day, signed by the podestà now styled François Gerra and by Dominico Croci, archiprêtre:
With the greatest pain the inhabitants of Castell’Arquato saw themselves mixed up with communes designated as enemies of order, law and peace. With tears in their eyes, they beseech you to believe that they never had the criminal intention of going against good order, or to support factious manoeuvres of corrupted and perverse men who seek to incite the unsuspecting villagers and by their schemes and abominable conduct become a scourge and bring calamity to the peaceful inhabitants of the plains who know nothing but the delights of nature and of life in the country. Let us assure you, M. Administrator General, that the inhabitants of Castell’Arquato have played no part in these last troubles; that on the contrary they went out of their way to make them stop; that they always helped the French; that they were never happier than when they saw [the French] in their midst and when they could join in combatting the progress of the rebels.Footnote 21
The letter adopted entirely the discourse of deluded villagers outlined in Lebrun’s first public statement and in all subsequent materials published by the French. Gerra acknowledges that rebels had been in town, but insisted that they had imposed themselves on unsuspecting country-folk; at worst, they may have induced the weakest members of this peaceful community to take a wrong turn. In other words, the situation in Castell’Arquato mirrored Lebrun’s hypothesis of brigands pushing good people to delinquency. Steering clear of any talk of possible popular discontent or of collusion between the town and the rebels, Gerra went out of his way to depict bucolic images of industrious peasants cultivating their fields in timeless harmony with nature – oblivious, that is, to such trifles as mutinies in the neighbourhood. Writing in the sentimental register popular in the eighteenth century, Gerra portrayed the innocence of the inhabitants of Castell’Arquato not as the mature decision of not siding with insurgents, but as the essential attribute of a childishly serene population incapable of revolt. This kind of sentimentalism intersected seamlessly with the paternalism exuded by the French official discourse and was thus most likely to make a positive impression on the higher-ups deciding the town’s fate. It was a sign of desperation that Gerra also felt the need to evoke his constituents’ willingness to assist in the actual repression as well.
The genuineness of such predisposition was tested the very next day, when French soldiers transited the area on the way to Lugagnano. Maybe trying to display additional unwavering loyalty, Gerra relayed the news brought to town by the French troops: that at the sight of French soldiers the montanari surrendered instantly and, white flag in hand, started yelling: ‘Peace! Peace!’ The few obstinate enough to resist (led by a certain Furani from the village of Vanetto da Monte – not one of Castell’Arquato’s villages – Gerra added helpfully) were instantly encircled and taken prisoner; in all likelihood, they would be shot. No complaints about this particular passage of troops through the village emerged from the podestà’s letter; it was just that the same Lieutenant Colonel Illica continued to cause consternation among the people with his foraging and the inhabitants of his unfortunate commune begged to be delivered of this onerous obligation, by military force if need be.Footnote 22
Defending local peasants against arbitrary hassles was not what French soldiers were sent in to do, however, as Gerra found out just hours after mailing his cry for help. On the contrary, the commune was ordered to provide food and shelter for another 350 infantry troops, arrived in Castell’Arquato on 14 January at 11 in the morning, under the command of General Pouget. Here we are, Gerra protested, without grains, without fodder.Footnote 23 In the panic, he housed the troops in a nearby closed convent recently declared national property (bien national). This decision earned him a reprimand from the French official entrusted with the administration of national property, who held the town responsible for the poor state in which the soldiers left the building.Footnote 24 What? Gerra asked, no doubt rolling his eyes: was not the custodian of the place responsible for watching over the furniture while the poor villagers did what they could to help the French – who, incidentally, were also asking for bed linen in addition to food and lodging? And those villagers barely got a chance to catch their breath before another French unit arrived on 16 January: 400 men this time, expecting shelter and the customary rations of food for the men and fodder for the horses. Could Moreau, whom they loved like a father, protect them?Footnote 25 Receiving no answer, Gerra took the pen again the next day, to write a long, plaintive letter meant to impress on the French administration the commune’s full submission for which he asked – again – to be rewarded with relief from the obligation to support French troops:
Considering that a garrison in Castell’Arquato is no longer necessary, because the rebels from the mountains have already returned to order, handing over the weapons to their parish priests who took them to Piacenza; and since even the most stubborn have submitted to that sweet yoke, that we ourselves never pretended to shake off; this community, following the suggestion of the Commander, sends Marco Albertini, the same who has been sent before, with instructions to go down on his knees, in its name, at the feet of Your Excellency, and implore liberation from billeting troops.
Bit by bit, the tone of the letters slides from humble obsequiousness to barely contained exasperation, verging on forewarnings that even compliant villagers could be pushed only so far. The citizens of Castell’Arquato were quite happy with the ‘sweet yoke’ of French occupation, Gerra wrote in a follow up note; but the insurrection – in which they never participated – was over; the rebels – whom they have always abhorred – were returning to the road of submission; why, then, were they still suffering from the calumnies of Lieut-Col Illica, who repaid their obedience with a ‘night of horror and blood’ where his soldiers sacked their properties, and confiscated weapons and fodder for animals, facts that Illica arrogantly denied? The incessant requisitions, Gerra continued, were worse than anyone could recall and the villagers were throwing themselves on Moreau’s good heart: surely, the administrator general would not want the name of the king to be sullied with acts of injustice!Footnote 26
Gerra grasped perfectly the punitive intent of French troops being installed repeatedly in Castell’Arquato, the result of its earlier fame for insubordination. An attentive reader of French discourses of law and order, he correctly identified the one way to stay the hand of punishment: not only giving up any attempt at voicing discontent but also creating a narrative compatible with the French narrative centered on brigandage. Therefore, the podestà worked tirelessly to discard the stigma of rebellion and move his commune to the much safer position of innocent victim of outside criminal circumstances. To advance this point further, he bravely put his villagers and the French on the same level, intimating that they were all struggling against the same calamity. Punishing Castell’Arquato was therefore a mistake rooted in a grave injustice. This was another astute argument: converting pleas for mercy into demands for justice took full advantage of the Napoleonic Empire’s stated goal of acting as a force for progress rather than imposing a brutal tyranny.Footnote 27
Creative co-operation
Bold and creative as it was, Gerra’s rhetorical prowess did not yield the expected results. A change of strategy was needed, and after a couple of weeks the podestà abandoned the melodramatic key in favour of the cold, detached language of bureaucratic precision. He started issuing receipts for the rations the commune was forced to provide and announced that all his men were instructed to deliver nothing without an official receipt, a bon, in which the exasperated town manager saw the last line of defence against abusive requisition. His distress only worsened when some army hands tried to ingratiate themselves with higher officers by offering overgenerous portions of bread and wine seized from the residents’ homes; besides, he added, underscoring the absurdity of his plight, what to do when three oxen were demanded and the entire village of Scipione, part of the commune, only had two? And what to do when their tormentor Illica refused to issue receipts for the animals and foodstuffs he was seizing? Could he be forced by law to do so, if only to avoid grumbling and irritation against state authority? Footnote 28
Gerra must have concluded that compliance with French demands, even when buttressed with repeated professions of submission and recorded in the grand book of French bureaucracy, was not enough to wash away the initial stigma of rebellion. Consequently, he volunteered to do his part to pacify the area around his commune. The podestà of nearby Fiorenzuola having told him, quite defiantly, that he knew nothing of the ‘concordat’ with the rebels, Gerra took the initiative of showing him Governor Lebrun’s and Prince Eugène’s messages to the rebels – or, rather, making him listen to them.The man selected for this mission, canonico Andrea Rossi, not seeing any way of making copies without delay, learned by heart the papers he had obtained from the Marquis Castati (who had already pleaded with the rebels) so as to be able to convey their contents faithfully, on the strength of his excellent memory.
Gerra may have been struck by the incongruous coexistence between ancient practices of oral communication, based on trust, and modern bureaucratic methods of inventorying formal receipts – in which he was fast losing trust, for none was reimbursed. On the contrary, fresh requisitions of wine and fodder were executed with no advance notice to the inhabitants. Only treasures of diplomacy and sweet talk (dolcezza) were keeping the population quiet: should any disturbances occur, the French would have only themselves to blame. A follow-up notice informed Moreau that canonico Rossi was still in the mountains, coaching rebels into submission. And indeed, on 27 January, Gerra announced triumphantly the success of Rossi’s direct diplomacy, which resulted in the area insurgents’ formal act of submission to the French authorities; for good measure, Gerra also arrested three vagabonds from his own commune, plus a foreigner caught roaming around the market, on suspicion of dealing with insurgents. Surely, this was enough to demonstrate his town’s loyalty, Gerra mused, and added that he was still expecting reimbursement for previously posted receipts. All was now quiet in the entire Val di Tolla, wrote a considerably relieved Gerra, making clear that his community deserved much credit.Footnote 29 Or was it? The day following this excellent news, the much despised Lieut-Col Illica reported a quite different situation: far from being quiet, Castell’Arquato was the scene of riots, with people running around shouting they wanted to ring the bells and have their weapons back; the very weapons, actually defective (benchè rotte) they had handed in only days earlier.Footnote 30
Faced with conflicting reports, Moreau reverted to the arid but safe terrain of red tape: yes, Castell’Arquato may have borne the brunt of insurrections, attacks, extortions and (maybe) unfair accusations of culpability; sloppy accounting, however, angered the departing administrator general the most, eager as he was to prove his competence to his own minders:
It pains me to see that your commune has not issued regular forms for the troops it has provided for and that you are not even able to designate, as I have already asked, which corps stayed in Castell’Arquato and for what periods of time.Footnote 31
The podestà’s receipts did not work their magic, then, for Moreau was still unsure which of their expenses were indeed reimbursable. The day after Moreau’s letter on book-keeping (it is not clear if the municipality ever received it) Gerra learned of Moreau’s impending departure and decided to send an almost affectionate farewell message ‘with the strongest and truest sentiments of reverential respect.’Footnote 32
There is no evidence that the municipality ever saw any money in return for items seized by the French army; on the other hand, none of the town’s citizens was executed and no one was sent to prison.Footnote 33 Castell’Arquato escaped the worst despite its documented reputation for rebelliousness. Moreau’s successor, General Junot, dispatched to the States of Parma to pacify the country the way Napoleon believed it should have been pacified, no longer listed Castell’Arquato among mutinous communes. He may have concluded that the early executions and endless rounds of requisitions were punishment enough. Once the storm passed, the town’s leadership must have adopted the slogan ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, for Francesco Gerra was invested as maire of Castell’Arquato and took the oath of loyalty to the Empire in the presence of the sub-delegate from Piacenza. Signalling the changing times, the municipality’s usher (bidello), who always called the meetings of the anzianato by ringing the bells, was instructed to stop doing so: ringing the bells (campana a martello) was how insurgents used to communicate among themselves; from now on, the usher would call municipal meetings by courier.Footnote 34
Conclusion
The available documentation does not tell us unambiguously whether, and to what extent, the citizens of Castell’Arquato actively contested French rule or whether they were, as municipal leaders insisted, bystanders happening to be in wrong place at the wrong time. But the larger significance of this episode lies elsewhere: in the words of Benjamin Kaplan, focusing on a small part of a vast ensemble ‘can bring to life a precious fragment of a lost past, restoring voices to the illiterate and agency to obscure individuals’ (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2014, 18). The particularities of the town’s experience illuminate the active quest for a narrative common ground as a way of achieving a modicum of social peace in troubled times. Castell’Arquato’s leaders were not alone in seeking to mollify the French with well-chosen words: ‘I am besieged by delegations from communes who come here to convey their expressions of repentance and to swear their obedience to the laws of the government’ wrote General Marion, Piacenza’s military commander on 11 January 1806.Footnote 35 Nor did French officials take at face value such sudden zeal for atonement. The unbending Albesani warned the authorities that all the hasty declarations of submission were only aimed at ‘saving one’s commune from reprisals while throwing the burden of guilt on one’s neighbours.’Footnote 36 Even so, senior officers generally accepted verbal expressions of obedience without trying too hard to weigh the genuine feelings behind them.Footnote 37 Public order, the goal of all Napoleon’s administrators, required accepting French-imposed rules, not loving them. This, in turn, provided local communities with the agency needed to participate to some extent in the events rather than passively succumbing to a fate decided elsewhere. The exceptionally coherent set of primary sources pertaining to the momentous weeks of insurrection in Castell’Arquato show that such agency was exercised by maintaining open channels of communication with the French authorities, by seeking to understand the nature of French power, and finally by ingeniously engaging different strands of the French narrative of firm but enlightened government. Podestà Gerra’s shrewdness also reflects the remarkable versatility of local Italian politics. Communes like Castell’Arquato lived through centuries of brutal invasions, political storms and dynastic conflicts. They endured by learning how to scrutinise the powers that be, how to get around forces many times stronger than themselves, how to let storms go by rather than be crushed in their passage, how to ensure that everything stays the same when everything changes, to paraphrase the famous adage in Lampedusa’s Gattopardo. It was by adapting long practised strategies of survival to new circumstances that Castell’Arquato shed its well-documented reputation for recalcitrance and remoulded itself into the picture of dutiful co-operation, its past transgressions forgiven and forgotten. At least on the surface, for events unfolding in the village after the French left the area complicated the situation once more.
A couple of weeks after the official end of the uprising, ex-commissioner Francesco Garibaldi solicited Castell’Arquato’s anzianato for reimbursement on account of his house being damaged while the briganti were in town. The anziani rejected his request, arguing that all official residences had been devastated and deploring the fact that such buildings, instead of being defended, had been left open for insurgents to do as they pleased.Footnote 38 Had municipal structures been left unattended on purpose? Who was responsible? Where had the sbirri been, or the regular militia members, whose duty it was to defend the commune against outside intruders? While no clear answers emerge and the anziani avoided further inquiries, the spirit of defiance did not vanish: on 12 March 1806 a petition signed by 43 inhabitants was sent to the regional government headquarters in Piacenza with requests for reductions of the tax burden.
Anti-Napoleonic revolts, and by extension the entire Napoleonic occupation, have become a site of historical controversy. In a recent historiography review, Anna Maria Rao traced the changes in historical interpretation from well-established modernisation narratives to emphasis on the traumatic experiences inflicted by Napoleonic modernisation policies on people who did not ask for so much (Rao Reference Rao2016). Some historians go as far as drawing comparisons with the Nazi occupation of Europe, endowing anti-Napoleonic insurgents with the aura of Resistance fighters, which in turn relegates co-operative leaders like Gerra to the treacherous shadows of collaboration (Viglione Reference Viglione2013, Sanguinetti and Pappalardo Reference Sanguinetti and Pappalardo2000). Reviewing the emerging historiography of anti-Napoleonic insurgencies, Antonino De Francesco cautioned that the relatively new discourse of occupation/resistance/collaboration often proceeds from a revisionist ideological angle that does little to deepen our understanding of the historical processes at work (De Francesco Reference De Francesco2001). The case-study of Castell’Arquato does not support sweeping ideological interpretations. The few clues hidden between the lines allow us to conclude that Castell’Arquato’s citizens voiced specific objections to Napoleonic impositions and even displayed a certain spirit of resistance, but were prepared to live with the times. Variable degrees of sympathy for rebels around the region – or even in their midst – failed to mature into a common agenda and did not fuel further uprisings. In the end, the majority opted for accommodation over confrontation. Podestà Gerra identified quickly the modest leverage granted by French policies and took the initiative of crafting a narrative strategy where strength was derived from his commune’s very weakness. Neither vile collaboration, nor heroic resistance, nor the romantic appeal of social banditry transpires from this situation; we are witnessing instead a sequence of clever, even moving, adjustment and survival manoeuvres where in a small way the tail somehow managed to wag the dog.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank David Laven for his invaluable critical comments on my early forays into Napoleonic history and Luigi Pelizzoni (Biblioteca Palatina Parma) for his help in locating key primary documents. Many thanks as well to this journal’s anonymous readers.
Note on contributor
Doina Pasca Harsanyi is professor of history at Central Michigan University, currently working on a monograph on Napoleonic policies in the States of Parma.
