of 1796 Bonaparte seems to have retained something of his old detestation of that republic; for at midsummer, when he was in the full career of his Italian conquests, he wrote to Faypoult, the French envoy at Genoa, urging him to keep open certain cases that were in dispute, and three weeks later he again wrote that the time for Genoa had not yet come.  Any definite action against this wealthy city was, indeed, most undesirable during the campaign; for the bankers of Genoa supplied the French army with the sinews of war by means of secret loans, and their merchants were equally complaisant in regard to provisions.  These services were appreciated by Bonaparte as much as they were resented by Nelson; and possibly the succour which Genoese money and shipping covertly rendered to the French expeditions for the recovery of Corsica may have helped to efface from Bonaparte’s memory the associations clustering around the once-revered name of Paoli.  From ill-concealed hostility he drifted into a position of tolerance and finally of friendship towards Genoa, provided that she became democratic.  If her institutions could be assimilated to those of France, she might prove a valuable intermediary or ally.

The destruction of the Genoese oligarchy presented no great difficulties.  Both Venice and Genoa had long outlived their power, and the persistent violation of their neutrality had robbed them of that last support of the weak, self-respect.  The intrigues of Faypoult and Salicetti were undermining the influence of the Doge and Senate, when the news of the fall of the Venetian oligarchy spurred on the French party to action, But the Doge and Senate armed bands of mountaineers and fishermen who were hostile to change; and in a long and desperate conflict in the narrow streets of Genoa the democrats were completely worsted (May 23rd).  The victors thereupon ransacked the houses of the opposing faction and found lists of names of those who were to have been proscribed, besides documents which revealed the complicity of the French agents in the rising.  Bonaparte was enraged at the folly of the Genoese democrats, which deranged his plans.  As he wrote to the Directory, if they had only remained quiet for a fortnight, the oligarchy would have collapsed from sheer weakness.  The murder of a few Frenchmen and Milanese now gave him an excuse for intervention.  He sent an aide-de-camp, Lavalette, charged with a vehement diatribe against the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before that august body.  At the close a few senators called out, “Let us fight”:  but the spirit of the Dorias flickered away with these protests; and the degenerate scions of mighty sires submitted to the insults of an aide-de-camp and the dictation of his master.