“As for your country, Monsieur de Melzi, it possesses still fewer elements of republicanism than France, and can be managed more easily than any other.  You know better than anyone that we shall do what we like with Italy.  But the time has not yet come.  We must give way to the fever of the moment.  We are going to have one or two republics here of our own sort.  Monge will arrange that for us.”

He had some reason for distrusting the strength of the democrats in Italy.  At the close of 1796 he had written that there were three parties in Lombardy, one which accepted French guidance, another which desired liberty even with some impatience, and a third faction, friendly to the Austrians:  he encouraged the first, checked the second, and repressed the last.  He now complained that the Cispadanes and Cisalpines had behaved very badly in their first elections, which had been conducted in his absence; for they had allowed clerical influence to override all French predilections.  And, a little later, he wrote to Talleyrand that the genuine love of liberty was feeble in Italy, and that, as soon as French influences were withdrawn, the Italian Jacobins would be murdered by the populace.  The sequel was to justify his misgivings, and therefore to refute the charges of those who see in his conduct respecting the Cisalpine Republic nothing but calculating egotism.  The difficulty of freeing a populace that had learnt to hug its chains was so great that the temporary and partial success which his new creation achieved may be regarded as a proof of his political sagacity.

After long preparations by four committees, which Bonaparte kept at Milan closely engaged in the drafting of laws, the constitution of the Cisalpine Republic was completed.  It was a miniature of that of France, and lest there should be any further mistakes in the elections, Bonaparte himself appointed, not only the five Directors and the Ministers whom they were to control, but even the 180 legislators, both Ancients and Juniors.  In this strange fashion did democracy descend on Italy, not mainly as the work of the people, but at the behest of a great organizing genius.  It is only fair to add that he summoned to the work of civic reconstruction many of the best intellects of Italy.  He appointed a noble, Serbelloni, to be the first President of the Cisalpine Republic, and a scion of the august House of the Visconti was sent as its ambassador to Paris.  Many able men that had left Lombardy during the Austrian occupation or the recent wars were attracted back by Bonaparte’s politic clemency; and the festival of July 9th at Milan, which graced the inauguration of the new Government, presented a scene of civic joy to which that unhappy province had long been a stranger.  A vast space was thronged with an enormous crowd which took up the words of the civic oath uttered by the President.  The Archbishop of Milan celebrated Mass and blessed the banners of the National Guards; and the day closed