BONAPARTE, BYRON & THE BRAVO

In 1797, Napoleon destroyed the Venetian Republic. Then things got really nasty.

   The “Great Man” school of historiography has been largely – and appropriately - discredited. It is clear, however, that there are very few individuals whose impact on human affairs has surpassed that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite the disastrous invasion of Russia and eventual defeat at Waterloo, his reputation for military brilliance remains intact. As a political leader, his legacy is more complicated. Within France, he facilitated a degree of reconciliation, reversing the some of the more radical innovations of the revolution, while fostering other reforms that persist to this day.

   Over time, he became ever more autocratic. Nevertheless, wherever his armies won territory from Europe’s traditional monarchs, they installed administrations that were – at least ostensibly – dedicated to Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternite, effectively ending feudalism in those lands. By contrast, his effort to re-enslave the people of Haiti was a notable failure.

    Culturally, his influence was also significant. Ludwig van Beethoven’s third symphony was originally dedicated to Bonaparte. After the Corsican declared himself Emperor of The French, the composer, appalled by the hypocrisy, withdrew the dedication. The work is now known as the Eroica, or Heroic Symphony. Other artists and intellectuals of Beethoven’s generation were inspired by Napoleon’s defiance of the old order. Indirectly, at least, he contributed to the spread of Romanticism in the 19^th century.

   Given the scope of his career, it should come as no surprise that “The Little Corporal” also shook up the sphere of Carnival. New Orleans is the most obvious example. Ongoing wars and the loss of profits from Haitian sugar plantations strained the French economy. In 1803, Bonaparte approved the sale of the vast Louisiana territory to the United States – introducing the tradition of Mardi Gras to the new nation. Venice’s ancient Carnevale was also affected by his actions.

   For more than one thousand years, “The Most Serene Republic” voted for its leaders. Under successive Doges, Venetian merchants maintained a virtual monopoly over trade with Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. Beginning in the 15^th century, the Ottoman Turks and other western naval powers began eroding that hegemony. Carnival provided an important alternate revenue stream. For the entertainment of revelers in the festive season, the world’s first commercial opera house was opened in 1637.

    Even as the Napoleonic forces occupied Lombardy and other parts of Italy, Venice’s rulers tried to steer clear of the conflict engulfing the continent. In 1797, when a naval skirmish in the lagoon killed one of his commanders, Bonaparte ordered an invasion of the city and the dismantling of its institutions.  

     The Venetian republic predated that of France by centuries. Despite this, Napoleon found it convenient to emphasize the abuses inherent in the government of La Serenissima. Banners hung in Saint Mark’s Square bore slogans such as “Dawning Liberty is protected by force of arms”. The new municipal government circulated luridly illustrated pamphlets depicting the horrors of the Doge’s prisons and the cruelty of the State Inquisition. Less publicly, but just as systematically, the French set about “liberating” artistic treasures from local churches and palaces, many of which can still be found in the Louvre and other museums. Il Carnevale, so intrinsically entwined with the city’s identity, was suppressed. Public celebrations would not be revived until the late 1970s.

     After Napoleon’s final exile to St. Helena, Venice became a possession of Austria.  Ideological differences notwithstanding, the Viennese court found it useful to adopt Bonapartist rhetoric vis-à-vis Venetian traditions. A state newspaper denounced Carnival as a “moral breakdown” which fostered “every physical corruption and misery, convulsing and then destroying”. In subsequent decades, this vision of decadence and despotism gained credence, even in countries with no direct stake in the region.

    In 1831, James Fenimore Cooper, the American author of The Last of The Mohicans, published a novel with an Adriatic, rather than an Adirondack setting. A historical romance, The Bravo takes place during an unspecified period. The republic’s power has begun to wane; the reputed cruelty of its leaders continues unabated. It is a place of constant surveillance and deception which seems to anticipate 20th century police states. At the same time, descriptive passages convey those elements of Venetian life that has charmed visitors for so long – lush private palazzi, imposing public monuments, strains of distant music heard across the still canals.

   The action unfolds against a festive background – not Carnival, but the “Marriage to The Sea”. In a custom dating back to at least the 12^th century, the Doge would toss a golden ring into the waters off of the Lido. For Cooper’s purposes, the precise celebration is almost irrelevant; his Venice is a place where, each evening,

   The porticoes became brilliant with lamps, the gay laughed, the reckless trifled, the masker pursued his hidden purpose, the cantatrice and the grotesque acted their parts, and the million existed in that vacant enjoyment which distinguishes the thoughtless and the idle. Each lived for himself while the state of Venice held its vicious sway, corrupting alike the ruler and the ruled, by its mockery of those sacred principles which are alone founded in truth and natural justice

   Like other Americans of his era, the author reveals an ambivalence toward European culture. The narrative is repeatedly interrupted by passages that extol the superiority of democracy in America and to condemn an “exceedingly heartless oligarchy”. At the time of publication, the United States had been an independent nation less than 50 years, and a patriotic idealism partly explains Cooper’s stance. His introduction, however, suggests a more cynical interpretation: he cites the influence of Pierre Daru, a French historian who, coincidentally enough, had served as an official in Napoleon’s Ministry of War.

   The Bravo is not good fiction. Didactic and overwrought, the plot introduces murderous villains and young lovers, concealed identities and daring escapes. Almost inevitably, it inspired an opera by Saverio Mercandante and Gaetano Rossi.

   During his sojourn on the canals, the poet Lord Byron took full advantage of the city’s fabled pleasures, yet in his autobiographical epic Childe Harold, he had no problem with casting Venice’s complex history as an arc of “Wealth – Vice – Corruption – Barbarism at last”.  He also wrote two plays that explore the motif of the sinister republic. Both were adapted to the operatic stage. Marino Faliero served as the basis of Donizetti’s work of the same name, while Giuseppe Verdi’s I due Foscari is derived from Byron’s The Two Foscari, written in 1821.

   Verdi was a key figure in the Risorgimento, the revolutionary drive for Italian unification. The composer was elected to the first parliament to sit after the Kingdom of Italy was declared in 1860. It is understandable that the Venetian Republic – like the peninsula’s other city-states -- would be anathema to the nationalist project. But one cannot escape the irony of employing an art form to savage the very society that engendered it.