The republic was extinguished, in the end, by a combination of military pressure and constitutional cowardice. The military pressure was a French Army of Italy under a twenty-seven-year-old Corsican general who, in the spring of 1796, had broken the Austrian defensive line on the Lombard plain and was advancing eastward across the terraferma toward the Adriatic. The constitutional cowardice was a Maggior Consiglio that, faced with a French ultimatum to abolish itself, voted to do so on the 12th of May 1797 by 512 votes to 30, with 5 blank ballots. The result was not even close. The last doge, Ludovico Manin, removed the cornu — the white linen ducal cap — from his head, handed it to his servant, and said, simply, "Tolè, no la dopero più" — "Take this, I shall not need it again". He retired to his palace and died of natural causes in 1802.
The campaign in Italy
Napoleon Bonaparte had taken command of the French Army of Italy on the 27th of March 1796, on the strength of his recent successful Toulon and Vendémiaire commands. The army he inherited was small, hungry, and demoralised. Within six weeks he had defeated the combined Piedmontese-Austrian forces in a series of running engagements (Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Mondovì) and forced the Piedmontese to sign the Armistice of Cherasco on the 28th of April. He then crossed the Po, defeated the Austrians again at Lodi on the 10th of May, occupied Milan on the 15th, and began a series of operations against the main Austrian field force in the Veneto plain. By the autumn of 1796 most of the terraferma was occupied or contested by French troops.
The Venetian Senate, predictably, declared formal neutrality. The French treated the declaration with public courtesy and private contempt. Bonaparte requisitioned supplies, billeted his troops in Venetian towns, marched his battalions across Venetian roads, and from time to time bombarded Venetian harbours when he felt his treatment was inadequate. The republic, having no army to speak of and a fleet of essentially ceremonial galleys, could do nothing. The Senate corresponded with Vienna and Paris and was politely ignored by both.
The Veronese Easter
The crisis began on Easter Monday, the 17th of April 1797, when an anti-French uprising broke out in Verona — a Venetian-administered terraferma city under French military occupation. The rising, known to history as the Pasque Veronesi, the "Veronese Easters", killed several hundred French soldiers over four days before being suppressed. It was not initiated by the Venetian state — the rising was substantially popular, organised by local Catholic clergy and anti-French notables — but it took place on Venetian territory, against an army with which Venice was nominally at peace.
Bonaparte was furious. The Veronese Easter gave him a pretext to settle the long-standing question of what to do with the republic, and he settled it with characteristic speed. On the 25th of April 1797 his army surrounded Verona and demanded an indemnity of forty thousand sequins. On the 1st of May he declared war on the Venetian Republic. On the 9th of May he sent commissioners to Venice with an ultimatum: the existing oligarchic constitution must be abolished, a democratic municipality installed, all French prisoners released, all Venetian arms surrendered, an indemnity of three million ducats paid, and three Venetian warships made over to France. The ultimatum allowed no negotiation.
The session of 12 May 1797
The Maggior Consiglio met on the morning of the 12th of May 1797 in its great hall on the upper floor of the Doge's Palace. The attendance was anomalously low: 537 patricians present, of an inscribed nobility of roughly a thousand. The lower-than-quorum attendance — by the strict reading of the constitution, a vote of this magnitude required six hundred patricians present — was itself, by some later accounts, an act of constitutional sabotage by patricians who did not wish the procedure to have undisputed legal force. The session opened with the reading of the French ultimatum, followed by the doge's tearful appeal that the Council accept it to prevent a French sack of the city. Reports from the lagoon islands suggested French troops were now visible on the Lido from the campanile of San Marco.
During the session a volley of musketry was heard from the Piazza below — Schiavoni soldiers loyal to the doge firing a celebratory salute as they boarded a galley for the Adriatic. The Maggior Consiglio mistook the noise for the beginning of the French assault. The doge, panicking, called for an immediate vote on the French terms. The vote was taken without further debate. By 512 to 30 with 5 blank, the Maggior Consiglio voted to dissolve itself, abolish the existing constitution, and transfer all sovereignty to a new municipal government in accordance with Bonaparte's ultimatum. The session lasted three hours.
What followed
The new municipal government, installed two days later, was a body of sixty members nominally elected by the citizens but in practice handpicked by the French commissioners. It abolished the Council of Ten, the Inquisitors, the Avogadori, the entire judicial apparatus, the Arsenal as a state enterprise, the Golden Book of the nobility, the censorship laws, and a great many other institutions of the old republic, in the space of about six weeks. It also presided over the systematic looting of the city by the French army. The bronze horses of San Marco were removed from the basilica facade and shipped to Paris (they would be returned in 1815). The lion of St Mark from the campanile of the Piazza, the gold and silver vessels of the basilica treasury, the manuscripts of the Marciana library, perhaps two hundred named paintings (including, most famously, Veronese's Wedding at Cana, still in the Louvre), and an unaccounted sum in gold and silver coin were transferred north under military escort. The total value, in the most conservative accounts, was about thirty million francs of 1797 — perhaps a third of the metropolitan annual GDP.
On the 17th of October 1797 Bonaparte and the Austrians signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, formally ending the War of the First Coalition. Article VI of the treaty transferred Venice and the Veneto to Austrian rule — without consultation with the new democratic municipality that had supposedly replaced the old oligarchy, and over the explicit protests of the French commissioners who had installed it. The new municipality was abolished. A Habsburg governor moved into the Doge's Palace. The eleven-hundred-year Venetian state was definitively over.
It is sometimes said that Venice ended ingloriously. This is true. It is also said that it ended without a fight. This is also true, in a strict military sense, but the underlying judgement is unfair: the republic had two thousand miscellaneous troops on the lagoon and a fleet of perhaps ten serviceable warships against a French army of forty thousand and an Austrian army of similar size both within a hundred kilometres. There was, in May 1797, no military option. The constitutional surrender saved the city from being sacked, the population from being killed in a fight that would have been lost in any case, and the buildings from being burnt. That this was achieved at the cost of self-respect is true; but most twentieth-century European countries also chose, when faced with comparable odds, to negotiate.
The next and final chapter follows what happened to the lagoon after 1797 — Habsburg rule, the brief revolutionary republic of Daniele Manin in 1848, Italian unification in 1866, the decline of the lagoon's fisheries and Adriatic trade, the artistic revival of the late nineteenth century, the wartime evacuation of 1917, the long postwar tourist boom, and the MOSE flood-barrier system that may or may not save the city from the sea.
End of Chapter IX